Minutes for the ALBUS meeting at the MPIfR in Bonn, 8 May 2007
M. S. Sipior
Persons in attendance:
Hans-Martin Adorf, MPA Garching (HMA)
Walter Alef, MPIfR (WA)
James Anderson, JIVE (JA)
Stephen Bourke, NUI Galway (SB)
Simon Garrington, Jodrell Bank (SG)
Mark Kettenis, JIVE (MK)
Huib van Langevelde, JIVE (HvL)
Cormac Reynolds, JIVE (CR)
Helge Rottman, MPIfR (HR)
Izabella Rottman, MPIfR (IR)
Alan Roy, MPIfR (AR)
Michael Sipior, JIVE (MS)
Ian Stewart, Jodrell Bank (IS)
The presentations made at the meeting are all available from the ALBUS wiki
page. The minutes cover the additional discussion points.
Ionospheric Calibration -- JA
JA explained that long baseline calibration with the extended LOFAR may
be difficult. He then brought up the difficulty of obtaining GPS
receiver data from a number of installations which treat the data
confidentially. AR pointed out that by 2009, GPS reciever data from
across the whole of Europe should be available in a unified database.
IS asked about the typical phase delay through the atmosphere, which JA
explained is about 10 Tec units at the zenith.
CR asked if the ionospheric calibration was better at telescope
installations with better GPS coverage. JA responded that he is
planning on investigating that in future, excluding telescopes with
poorer coverage.
Data Archive Access -- CR
SG mentioned that the MERLIN pipeline does repointing of data already.
Wide Field Imaging -- JA
JA pointed out that parallelisation of regridding would be extremely
useful to this project, but that it would require a substantial
modification of the relevant AIPS tasks. CR asked JA if he was planning
on doing the modifications himself, to which JA responded that, given
the potential usefulness to JIVE researchers, this could be developed
in-house. IS asked if it was better to write new AIPS code, or re-use
code which already exists in Casa.
The Future of ParselTongue -- Discussion
To improve the visibility of ParselTongue, it was asked whether PT
could eventually be distributed with AIPS. HvL said that he had looked
into that, but that there was no interest at NRAO for this. He pointed
out that the VLA community is much larger than the EVN, and so many
potential users are being missed. Someone asked whether a GUI to
ParselTongue could hasten adoption, to which MK responded that the bulk
of users run ParselTongue scripts, not interactive sessions. HR asked
if perhaps a new community of non-programming AIPS users would be
attracted by a useful GUI. HvL said that, better than a GUI, making PT
more context-sensitive would be a real advantage for interactive users.
CR asked about other ways to get PT noticed in the larger community. HR
said that more extensive documentation would go a long way towards
making PT useful to a wider audience. He also suggested distributing PT
in rpm or deb formats for easy installation onto Linux boxes.
The ProC Workflow Engine -- HMA
In the question session after this talk, HMA brought up the point that
integration of PT into ProC could be useful to introduce folks to VLBI
data reduction, as it easy to construct a data reduction chain using
the interface. Someone mentioned in the same vein that this could be
very helpful in constructing data pipelines as well.
The next ALBUS meeting will likely be a ParselTongue users meeting, taking
place around the ERIS meeting in Bonn this September.