NRAO is involved in three initiatives as part of the ALBIUS program.

This cycle most of the effort on wide-band and wide-field imaging was spent on the work to build the generic framework for full Mueller matrix treatment during imaging. The framework will ultimately be used to implement a number of special cases required for EVLA, ALMA and LOFAR. This includes wide-band AW-Projection and A-Projection with heterogeneous array support (required for ALMA and LOFAR). In a collaborative effort with the LOFAR team, full polarization AW-Projection using a time-variable model for the LOFAR station beams was demonstrated to work as expected. This has now been incorporated in a LOFAR imager. Work to integrate the wide-band imaging algorithms in this framework is in progress.

High performance computing and parallelization continue to advance, the upcoming release of CASA will contain the first implementation of these algorithms in production CASA code for end users. Several of the most time consuming data calibration and editing steps are now performed in parallel. In addition both spectral line and continuum imaging can now be performed in parallel. Several bottlenecks in the parallel processing of data have been identified and removed. We expect to continue to improve the performance and capabilities of the parallel processing through the next quarter, and look forward to feedback from the public use of these facilities.

NRAO's roles in the ALBiUS Advanced Fringe Fitting effort are largely organizational and supervisory. We organize a bi-weekly telecon, provide technical advice and help with the integration of the new code into CASA. Our effort between April 1 and June 30 2011 has been focused on getting the first bits of code into CASA by the mid September code freeze. A next quarter milestone will be completing this.

Note: There may be simulated images with and without AW-Projection in full polarization that can be included, but the LOFAR folks might include it in their side of the ALBIUS report. Sanjay has written to them but it may be too late to get them now.