CASA User Testing Meeting Minutes - 2015-03-17, 09:00 Socorro / 11:00 Charlottesville

Post-meeting minutes notes will be appended in blue text.

Agenda

Participants

Present: Mark R., Juergen, Steve

Apologies: Crystal (on travel), Amanda (out of the office), Anand (co-ordinating Helpdesk testing)

Locations

https://staff.nrao.edu/cal/RoomListing.htm

  • Socorro: AOC-280; IP: 146.88.6.10 or AOC-317; IP: 146.88.6.8
  • Charlottesville: Room 331; IP: 192.33.117.19


Minutes (Main Points Only)

Status

  • 4.4 feature freeze officially passed. Test/stable/monthly packages are being produced for RHEL5 and 6. OS X package production (for 10.10 and 10.9/10.8) is currently a work in progress.
  • A 4.3.1 patch release for Linux and OS X was released recently (to address CAS-7298 and CAS-7325). This version was used at last week's CDE. A workaround for a lesser issue regarding the setting of the PYTHONPATH environment variable will be addressed via an update to the "Known Issues" list.
  • 4.3.1 is the current public release version for both Linux (RHEL5 and 6) and OS X (10.8). 4.2.2 is still currently being used for pipelined ALMA data reduction at the NAASC, but 4.3 has now been adopted for "manual calibration" reductions.
    • The same general-purpose CASA launcher script has now been deployed at CV, SOC and GB. Details are on the appropriate drop-down menu of the public CASA pages at http://casa.nrao.edu
      • For anyone using test machines zuul01, 03 and 04 are running RHEL6, zuul02 is running RHEL5. REMEMBER: Use /usr/bin/casa on these machines to make sure that you are running the new test/stable packages (there are RPM installations on these).
  • Latest stable package (Linux only): 4.4.112 (svn r32708)

Number of CASA Jira tickets with "Ready To Test"/"Under Test" status (including EA, EU, JAO, Software-only tickets, but excluding Pipeline) prior to meeting: 50 (was 52).

Number of CASA Jira tickets with "Ready To Test"/"Under Test" status (including EA, EU, JAO, Software-only tickets) following meeting: 47.

Agenda

  • 4.4 feature freeze deadline (March 1st) has passed. No new features can be added to 4.4 from now on. 4.4 pre-release branch to be announced soon, user testing to be conducted on the 4.4 stable packages for now (Linux only, OS X still to come).
  • New ticket assignments (see below).
  • The "nag list", "input required" items
  • Recent discussion items:
    • Crystal had previously noted that she had encountered a problem when taking a data set from CASA to FITS and back to CASA again: problems are reported with axes coordinates when (e.g.) attempting to use impbcorr. A Jira ticket was to have been created for this. Ticket number?
  • Other testing items specifically raised?
    • TBA

New Testing Assignments (see relevant section below)

  • Assignment of any other "To Be Assigned" Items.
  • The next meeting is scheduled to take place on April 7th.
  • Any Other Business: TBA

Old Action Items

  • Mark R. will think about adding a section to the meeting notes that identifies testing items that have recently been completed and may be of wider use to users (e.g. the new statistics framework).

New Action Items Arising

  • Mark R. to try to identify list of primary 4.4 testing targets. Ask about mstransform-related items, HPC stuff in particular, plus others?

PART 1: Items to be Covered During Meetings (as time permits)

Propose to Close Items

  • CAS-5785 (May 2014): drastic split speed discrepancies depending on whether spw is set or not. Input Required. Ticket back with reporter for more info. Known behavior for MSSelection. Some discussion of this item and related topics: split with spw (see also CAS-3666 below). It would be good to be able to select by spw on a large dataset. Will MSTransform have the same problem? Do MMSs help here? Ticket pinged repeatedly without a response from the reporter. Provisionally resolved as incomplete, since it will be addressed via other performance testing tickets at a future date.

Items Overdue for Status Updates (i.e. the "Nag List")

  • CAS-7318 (Feb): 4.4 item. Verify unpolarized calibrator mode for linear basis (ALMA). Under Test. Tester: Steve. Ticket pinged. Steve and George to nag each other about this one.
  • CAS-4469 (Jun+ 2013): Split with channel averaging is creating spurious spectral features and weight is wrong when there has been channel flagging. Subtask of CAS-5245. Critical item. Was "Under Test". Additional clarification of testing details has been requested by Crystal, but she suspects that the channel weighting work done so far will not be sufficient to resolve the issue raised in the ticket - an additional option may be needed. Tester: Crystal. Set to "Input Required" and passed to George for comment.
  • CAS-3580 (Aug): 4.4 item. Prediction of expected image based noise based on Tsys. Under Test in 4.3. Tester: Eric V. (to be tested at the JAO). Kept open at Remy's express request. Recent testing continuing by Eric. Tracked elsewhere(?)
  • CAS-4758 (Sep): 4.4 item. fluxscale fails if one of the reference fields is flagged. Under Test (r31121+) in current (new-style) stable. Tester: Claire. No testing progress on this since October. Claire had been trying to find a suitable dataset for testing. Steve thought that this should actually be fairly easy to testand that Claire and/or he may have been able to test this one. Ticket pinged.
  • CAS-6912: 4.4 item now. makemask copy always replaces image. 4.3 item. "Under Test" again in stable package 4.4.9+. Tester: Juergen. Close to done? Needs to be checked again with recent stable package. Ticket pinged.
  • CAS-4623 (Aug): 4.4 item now. SetJy: Method to set Pol Fraction and Angle as Function of Frequency. Under Test in current packages. Tester: Preshanth. Had been pending access to new testable package. Steve now has a test dataset for this. Ticket passed to Preshanth, although Steve will probably also do a bit of testing of this one. Ticket pinged: Preshanth has tested this, and promised to file his report weeks ago. Preshanth has been in Canada recently, hence the lack of a response. Steve's had a bit of a look at this, and thinks that it already sort of works. A test script is probably needed, though. Preshanth's back in the country now, and aware of the need to finish up this ticket soon.
  • CAS-6707 (Sep): mstransform problems with CALDEVICE and SYSPOWER sub-tables when creating an MMS. Under Test in 4.3, but 4.4 item now. Tester: Previously passed to Steve for VLA user tester assignment. Previously discussed at length: Feature was already shipped in 4.3. To resolve or not to resolve (that is the question)? Steve will talk to James Robnett to get a sense of the status of parallelization.
  • CAS-6527 CASA collides with easy_install.pth. 4.4 Blocker item. Under Test. Tester: Remy. Crash reported in ticket no longer happens (at the moment). The re-inclusion of PYTHONPATH may potentially break things again, though, and conclusive testing for this issue is dependent on an OS X package.
  • CAS-6529: 4.4 item now. MS processed with mstransform not handled correctly by uvcontsub, clean, etc... Under Test in latest new-style stables and pre-releases. Tester: Juergen (was Kristina). Close to done.
  • CAS-6962 (Oct): 4.4 item now. wvrgcal segfaults on a 9-antenna dataset in which only one antenna has a WVR, and minnumants=2. Under Test again. Tester: Todd. Ticket currently back with developers. Work ongoing, ticket pinged.
  • CAS-6805 (Feb 2015): importasdm should only overwrite online text files if overwrite=True. 4.4 item. Under Test. Tester: DA
  • CAS-7034 (Mar 2015): Development of new Common Statistics Framework. Under Test now in current stable package. Tester: Peter Teuben. Ticket pinged.
  • CAS-7363 impbcor fails when using exported and "re"-imported image. 4.4 item. Currently Under Test in stable. Tester: Nathan.
  • CAS-7364 (Feb 2015): wvrgcal has problems with purely numerical field names. 4.4 item. Under Test. Tester: Thomas Stanke
  • CAS-5836 (Nov): 4.4 item. Create new task imrebin. Under Test again in stable. Tester: Amanda (was Adam). The dropdeg and box parameters should be hooked up correctly now. Mostly works, but a couple of details identified and addressed.
  • CAS-7082 (Mar): ia.convolve2d gives unusual SEVERE message when asked to convolve to the same resolution. Under Test in stable. Tester: Nathan (provisionally, Juergen if not).
  • CAS-5053 (Mar): ms.getscansummary() fails to list all spws of a scan. Under Test in stable. Tester: DA. Dialogue currently ongoing on ticket now.

Other Items Currently "Under Test"

  • CAS-7368 (Feb 2015): plotbandpass(showatm=T, overlay='baseband' or 'spw') should produce atmospheric curves that are not grossly offset along the y-axis. Under Test. 4.4 item. Tester: Pipeline Group
  • CAS-3571 (Jan): Ionospheric Correction (TECOR). Under Test now (probably in the 4.3 release). George to liaise with testers Jason Kooi, Chris Hales and Huib Intema. Steve will discuss this with George, and may look into it a bit himself as well. George reassigned this one to Chris, as discussed.

  • CAS-7353 (Feb 2015): msmd/MSMetaData does not fully support multi-MSes. 4.5 item. Under Test now. Tester: Nate

"Ready To Test" Items Pending Tester Assignment

  • CAS-7370 (Mar 2015): beamArea in viewer statistics needs more general calculation. Available in stable now. RTT. Tester: Nate
  • CAS-7376 (Mar 2015): listobs does not show spws in numerical order (in ALMA ACA dataset with FDM tsys spws). Available in stable now. RTT. Tester: DA (ticket passed to Anand)
  • CAS-7328 (Mar 2015): imregrid does not rotate beam in J2000-GALACTIC conversion. Available in stable now. RTT. Tester: Juergen
  • CAS-7109 (Mar 2015): Linear full mosaics. Available in stable now. RTT. Tester: Steve
  • CAS-7207 (Mar 2015): Flux density not working for multiple beam one per channel image. Available in stable now. RTT. Tester: Juergen
  • CAS-7314 (Mar 2015): Add capability to average across fields. Officially Under Test already, but needs the VI/VB2 version of PlotMS to test, so this would be an advance assignment. Tester: TBD Question raised during the meeting: What is the intended science use case for this? Is it that different observations of the same field source might carry different field IDs?

Single Dish (to be skipped during the meeting)

  • See SD ticket list below

Input Required

  • CAS-5334 (Feb 2014): Ellipse regions have wrong width (RA). Second fix committed. Was previously tested in casapy-test (r29326), set to Input Required for input from developer. Tester: Paul. Pushed back to 4.4. Cropped up in a Helpdesk ticket recently, so still a problem. Bouncing between developers at the moment. Ticket pinged to try to establish if this is still an issue/

  • CAS-7297 split fails on combined 12m+7m ms. Input Required from Amanda.
  • CAS-5806 Mathematical prediction of post-gridding single dish beam. Formerly a 4.3+ Blocker, now "Critical". "Input Required?* Developer has done some modelling, but... ? This is a "blocker of a different kind..." High priority (blocking further development). Currently Input Required from Kana. Crystal and Kumar had been in discussion, but this ticket has been quiet since (effectively) December. Post-4.4 item now.
  • CAS-6975: not evidently possible to overplot from casapy. Input Required from Remy. Ticket pinged previously. Post-4.4 item now.
  • CAS-7282 (Feb 2015): add Gauribidanur Radio Heliograph to CASA. New item, low priority, post-4.4. Ticket with developer, but more input needed from user first. Ticket pinged.
  • CAS-4735 (Nov): imsmooth needs additional option for single dish use. Subtask of CAS-5844 (above). Open again. Tester: Tsuyoshi. Critical item. Code committed to trunk. 4.3 item. Some testing done, mostly works as intended. Input Required from Crystal for some remaining changes. Any remaining future work will have to be for post-4.4.
  • CAS-6124: imfit subtasks:
    • CAS-4538: migrate imfit input estimates from file to input parameters. Input Required (was "On Hold"). Subtask of CAS-6124. Ticket passed to Juergen, pending a CSSC discussion of what needs to be done and a scheduling of the work. Pushed back to 4.5. Ticket pinged. Juergen: More thought about imfit still needed by Science.
    • CAS-6234: imfit estimates should allow sky coordinates in addition to pixel values. Input Required (was "On Hold"). Subtask of CAS-6124. Ticket with Juergen, pending a CSSC discussion of what needs to be done and a scheduling of the work. Pushed back to 4.5. Ticket pinged.Juergen: More thought about imfit still needed by Science.
  • CAS-4748 (Dec 2012): Polarization selection does not select SIGMA. Input Required. Passed to Jeff for prioritization. Sanjay thinks it's a low-priority item. Version 4.5+. Ticket pinged.
  • CAS-5886 (Dec 2013): bizarre clean boxes for large images. Awaiting input from one developer to another. Version 4.5+.
  • CAS-6175 Plotms-vis-model (minus) normalization (visnorm) in gain,bandpass (seems to be missing now). Ticket with Jeff for follow-up. Pushed back to 4.5. Ticket pinged.
  • CAS-4349 Amplitude calibration for single dish. Pushed back to 4.5+. Input from Tsuyoshi requested. Ticket pinged.
  • CAS-2825 Support for Lissajous mapping. Pushed back to 4.5+. Input from Tsuyoshi requested. Discussion ongoing.
  • CAS-5162 (Sep 2013): Improvements in flagging documentation and examples. Input Required from Science (via Jeff). This ticket has been left untouched since May 2013... Version 4.5+.

Other Blockers

  • Miscellaneous VI/VB-related tickets:
    • CAS-6688 Turn on new vi/vb within imager and test. 4.4 item, but Unscheduled. Currently with Jim. Not a blocker for the 4.4 release?
    • CAS-7393 plotms needs MSTransformVI2 to writeFlag(). 4.4 item. New item. Open. Currently with Justo.
    • CAS-7398 VB2 should list Unsorted row indices by rowIds(). 4.4 item. New item. Open. Currently with Jim.

  • CAS-7251 sdimaging crashed on 4.3 prerelease for OS X 10.8. 4.3 item(?). Open. Currently with Kana. Takeshi had been looking into this. Crash reproduced at NAOJ, but not yet in CV. Maybe NAOJ could try reproducing it again with 4.3.1 prerelease? Not a blocker for an OS X 10.10 CASA 4.4 release, but may need to be investigated further if/when we look at creating a 10.8 package. Will know more once we have CASA 4.4 OS X packages.


PART 2: Items Listed for Informational Purposes (note that these will not normally be specifically discussed during the meeting unless someone raises them)

Unable to Test Items

  • CAS-3614 Calibration and Analysis of Single Dish Polarization. Pushed back to 4.5+. Input from Tsuyoshi requested: Response was that cal/analysis strategy for SD pol not yet established, so no input possible yet. Leaving as "Input Required" until then.
  • CAS-7240 (Jan): 4.4 item. Dot option for grid lines in plotms does not work on Mac. RTT, pending a suitable OS X test/stable 4.4 package. Tester DA
  • CAS-7247 (Jan): 4.4 item. peak value in spectral profile Gaussian estimates window overlapping with slider on Mac. RTT, pending a suitable OS X test/stable 4.4 package. Tester: DA
  • CAS-4592: plotms on 10.7 issues. Half fixed due to Qt updates. Was "ARTT" in 4.2.1 and 4.2.2 pre-release. Scheduled again now. Also seen under OS X 10.8+. Ticket with the developer. Tester: Nathan. Awaiting a new OS X package.
  • CAS-5084 (May): Testing multi-term support in pclean. Lots of feedback supplied by Kristina and Claire. On Hold (since August 2013) and assigned to Kumar pending class refactoring. To be left on hold, pending the refactored imager classes.
  • CAS-6433 (Apr): Implement a function to derive Jy/K factor from amplitude calibrator observation. Open. Currently with developer. Was targeted for November 23rd Pipeline release. Pushed back to March(+) 2015 Pipeline release and flagged as a Pipeline Blocker.
  • CAS-6232 (Mar): writing version numbers in GUIs. Under Test in 4.3. Most recent commit to trunk was r29373. Tester: Juergen. However, this also needs to be checked in the table browser, the work on which is currently unscheduled. Spawned another ticket CAS-7033) for its underlying cause.
  • CAS-5379 - Subtle inconsistencies with other programs in Galactic Coordinates (Adam and Harvey). In a nutshell, shifts of ~0.2" are seen when taking data into other packages (e.g. DS9, IDL which both seem to agree with each other). It is unclear yet if this is an incorrect implementation in one or more packages, or possibly just a precision error. This is a subtle issue, and was pushed back. Ticket stalled. Needs to be looked at by someone with lots of time. To be left as-is for now. This needs significant work, including new science papers on how to actually define the Galactic coordinate system? Needs casacore discussion; this can be part of that. Passed to Jeff for now. Pushed back to some indefinite future release.
  • CAS-4636 (Oct 2012): Elevation dependent opacity application w/ Tsys. Still awaiting input from Science. Had been "On Hold" since August, awaiting data. Switched to Input Required and passed to Crystal for comment. Bumped back to 4.4+. Work on this is "Unscheduled" until further notice (more than a year, now). * CAS-6243: sdimaging does not accept type numpy.string_ for fieldid. Unscheduled, pending identification of a suitable example case. Commit was r29988. Discussion ongoing. Pushed back to 4.4(+). Tester: Todd. Todd hasn't seen this happening, but hasn't specifically tested for it either. Ticket pinged.

Upcoming Ready to (Re)Test Items

Not Yet Assigned To Testers

  • TBA

Single Dish

See below "assigned" SD list.

Already Assigned To Testers

  • CAS-6952 wvrgcal fails on a source at low elevation (11 deg), but PWV is only 3.5mm toward the target and there is no sign of ground spillover. 4.4 item. Currently RTT. Tester: Todd. Full retesting will require CASA version 4.4.112 or newer.
  • CAS-5893 (May): Now a 4.5 item. Add the ability to write a spectral profile to an ASCII file in the ia tool. Was Under Test in 4.3. Commit was r29681. Tester: Assigned to Juergen for testing and a possible CSSC discussion. Might also need a task adding for this, but this will be 4.5 work. Recent testing done, passed back to dev for 4.5 work.
  • CAS-6951 (Oct): 4.4 item now. mstransform creates a 4-polarization DATA column for single-polarization ALMA WVR data, and a 1-polarization DATA column for four-polarization ALMA data. Fix already included in current new-style test/stable packages newer than 4.2.23. Scheduled again now. Tester: Todd. Ticket currently back with developer(s) again.
  • CAS-3532 (Sep): Incorporation of Alma Primary Beam in Mosaic. Was ARTT, currently Scheduled. Tester was Scott S., but ticket passed to Crystal for input. Some test imaging done. Ticket with developer. Pushed back to 4.5.
  • CAS-3517 (Aug): Improve remapping interface (Cal libraries). Input Required from developer. Tester: Steve. Some testing done, recommendations made, ticket back with developer. Discussion ongoing. Further callibrary work to be pushed out to 4.4 in Jira. Pushed back to 4.4. Previously identified as a duplicate of CAS-5617, but now (also) a sub-task of it.
  • CAS-5127 (May): Document ia toolkit methods. Status Scheduled. Mark is working on this. Most of Juergen's prioritized list of 26 items has been done. Dates to be added his future documentation updates. Prioritized by Mark. Ongoing. ia.regrid docs will require more work. Still needs code commits. Mark to restart work on this under Linux soon.

Single Dish

  • CAS-6997 (Mar): MS transition: create a new baseline task and implement blfunc='poly'. Subtask of CAS-6988. Under Test. Tester: TBD. Ticket passed to Bunyo.
  • CAS-6988 (Mar): MS transition: enable maskmode='list' in new baseline task for MS. Subtask of CAS-6988. Under Test. Tester: TBD. Ticket passed to Bunyo.
  • CAS-6996 (Mar): MS transition: Enable calmode='otfraster' in sky calibration. Subtask of CAS-6988. Under Test. Tester: TBD. Ticket with Bunyo.
  • CAS-6994 (Mar): MS transition: update weight in sky calibration. Subtask of CAS-6988. Under Test. Tester: TBD. Ticket with Bunyo.

  • CAS-5488 (Mar 2015): include beam size in header of SD image. Under Test. Passed to Bunyo.
  • CAS-6993 (Jan): MS transition: apply position switching calibration. Ready To Test. Tester: Bunyo. Needs CASA version 4.4.99 or newer to test. Some provisional testing done with test package, error reported. Fix now being worked on.
  • CAS-6992 (Jan): MS transition: Define a task to generate Tsys calibration table. Under Test. Tester: Bunyo. Testing ongoing. Latest commit just missed 4.4.110.
  • CAS-6572: (Aug): A new baseline task that handles baseline table. Under Test in latest 4.3 casapy-test/new-style stable packages. Mostly done. Ticket with Kana. Ticket pinged.

-- MarkRawlings - 2015-03-13

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Topic revision: 2015-03-18, MarkRawlings
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