Achievements in reporting period:
Last update Sep 28 11:00, reports are in from ASTRON, JIVE, MPIfR, ESO and Manchester.

  • List of activities organised during reporting period
  • Meetings attended – both meetings for NA organisation or meetings on behalf of RadioNet
    • JIVE: S. Bourke attended the European Radio Interferometry School in Oxford
    • ESO: R. Laing attended the e-MERLIN Legacy Technical Working Group meeting in Manchester (July 15) and two discussion meetings in Oxford on coordination of software work there with ALBiUS and ALMA developments (August 10 and Sept 11).

Problems / Issues

  • Issues - organisational, administrative or other problems foreseen
    • One issue that has been identified before is that NRAO is unable to allocate resources for the evaluation of fringe-fitting, while they remain interested in the implementation tasks. A possible solution has been identified in South Africa, and it is desired that they enter the DoW by January 2010
    • The Cambridge partner indicated before that they will have a problem providing the contracted matching to the project if their STFC project, which was favorably reviewed earlier, will not be funded. We have not received an update on this (yet).
    • At MPIfR, the date for delivery is given as month 18 in DoW but will probably be later due to hiring start in 2010. Another issue regards the software license for code developed for use in DiFX, which must be public.
    • The recruitment at ESO was delayed. However, the recruitment of ARC scientist has been completed. Dirk Petry, former CASA developer for the ALMA construction project, accepted the ESO offer and will join the ARC as of October the 1st. This delay has allowed continuity of staffing within the ALMA software group, which will indirectly benefit the ALBiUS effort. Requires some delay in deliverables; no change of scope.
    • The Manchester partner is looking to employ someone for the funded part of the ALBiUS work. However, due to the current UK funding issue, they will probably make the appointment after the end of this calendar year.
  • Red flags - major problems

Forward Look

  • Plan for next year – 12 month outlook, more detail in first 6 month (including budget for each planned meeting/workshop)
    • ASTRON:
      • A sub-meeting is being planned in order to coordinate some of the ALBiUS tasks with NRAO's CASA development and to further align these tasks within ALBiUS.
    • JIVE:
      • Extend ParselTongue capabilities for distributed processing and identify/select a science project to use ParselTongue for implementing a distributed pipeline. Start tailoring ParselTongue for the needs of this project.
      • Through particpation in the Nancay workshop an analysis of coding fringe fitting in MeqTrees may get explored
    • MPIfR:
      • An internal meeting is scheduled for Oct 27th to discuss manpower allocation and to start the hiring process. A strong engineering student has been identified who is likely to contribute 3 or 4 months towards the RFI mitigation project during May-July and Dec 2010. Additional manpower will be needed, requiring a hire.
    • ESO:
      • 3 months: Get Dirk Petry familiar with the project. Essential meetings with JIVE to plan effort on interoperability and with ASTRON, JBCA, Oxford, Cambridge, NRAO to establish coherent programme over Mosaic/direction-dependent calibration/distributed imaging/polarization tasks.
      • 6 months: Meetings of the developers to update and discuss project progress. Report on current and proposed mosaic imaging software.
  • Expected milestones/deliverables
    • ASTRON:
      • Task 6.2.5 has started. The first internal milestone (CASA Imager in distribution framework using MWImager script) will be reached by the end of the month. Task 6.3.3 will start in month 13.
    • JIVE:
      • December 2009: Merging AIPSlite into ParselTongue; this will greatly ease deployment of AIPS and ParselTongue on HPC clusters (Manpower: Mark Kettenis & Stephen Bourke)
      • March 2010: ParselTongue distribution with enhanced data distribution capability; optimizing data distribution is crucial for efficient parallelisation. At intermediate stages we will distribute only AIPS calibrartion tables instead of full data sets. (Manpower: Mark Kettenis)
      • March 2010: Identify project for (Manpower: Mark Kettenis + input from other ALBiUS partner.)
      • End-of-project: Deliver enhanced ParselTongue dsitribution.
    • MPiFR:
      • RFI mitigation software as major milestone. Other minor milestones: Median filtering in ALBiUS, multi-rate filtering.
    • ESO:
      • Report on mosaic software (month 12)
    • Cambridge (from previous report): Development of a (mathematical) framework for characterising image-plane effects for full polarization imaging. (4 man months) + End Q2 2010 Development of a generic parameterised telescope description for full stokes imaging for the measurement equation. (3 man months) + End Q3 2010 Implementation a system in MeqTrees or/and CASA. (5 man months)

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