CASA Update
Recent Progress and Future Plans
of CASA and PIPELINE

Takeshi Nakazato (NAOJ)
on behalf of CASA andPIPELINE teams

Common Astronomy Software
Applications (CASA)
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CASA

A data reduction and analysis software of data observed by radio
astronomical telescopes, both interferometer and single-dishDeveloped in collaboration with NAOJ, NRAO, ESO, and ASIAACASA officially supports ALMA, VLA, Nobeyama 45-m, and ASTE
All ALMA PI data are processed by CASA before delivered to observers
and data processed by CASA are archived– ALMA Pipeline also uses CASA inside
The latest CASA release is 5.1.1
Schedule of next release:– A patch release 5.1.2 for VLA (TBD)– CASA release 5.2 for HPC (TBD, may be internal release)– CASA release 5.3 for Cycle 6 (ETA March 2018)

CASA Progress (as of 5.1.1)

CASASee https://casa.nrao.edu for detailGeneral• Launch CASA Docs to consolidate and streamline reference manual,
cookbook, inline help and other material• Crash reporter has been introduced to collect information to help
diagnose why CASA crashed• Boolean shortcuts, T and F, are no longer accepted (True/False)
Interferometry••

tclean improvements:– new automasking algorithm: usemask='auto-multithresh’– absorption masking support (usemask='auto-multithresh’, experimental)
Pipeline improvements: Flagging based on calibrated visibility amplitude

CASA Progress - continued

CASASingle-dish• MS-transition is completed– ATNF Spectral Analysis Package (ASAP) is removed from CASA
– All tasks based on ASAP are also removed• importasdm in lazy mode accepts FLOAT_DATA• Support of ALMA Cycle 5– Improved processing workflow for Solar fast-scanning observations– Improved logging in sdbaseline• Support of NRO 45m Telescope– Task importnro supports import of NRO 45-m observations in thespectral window mode
– Task sdimaging supports several types of projections

CASACASA - Major Development Activities
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Update MeasurementSet to version 3 (MSv3)– for ALMA, ng-VLA, and SKA– converter from version 2 will be provided
Support for polarization calibration heuristics
Further improvement of tclean:– automasking, beam model, performance, memory footprint, …
resolved calibrator data
A systematic benchmarking campaign for CASA performance and its
tracking

Users feed back would be appreciated (via help desk, etc.)

CASA

ALMA Pipeline Status - Interferometry• Calibration pipeline first
acceptance Cycle 2• Imformative imaging
pipeline first deployedCycle 3• Imaging pipeline first
acceptance Cycle 4• Enhanced calibration andimaging pipeline
acceptance Cycle 5Cycle 2
Cycle 3
Cycle 4
No Intervention

Intervention

TweakedSent to Manual

CASA

ALMA Pipeline Status - Single-Dish• Standard mode observations of ALMA are processed by Pipeline
Pipeline Results (as of Dec. 4)• Cycle 3– 195 MOUSes processed– 70% Delivered to PI(w/o intervention)• Cycle 4– 101 MOUSes processed– 78% Delivered to PI(w/o intervention)

Cycle 3Cycle 4

ALMA Pipeline: Toward Cycle 6•
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CASA

Parallelization
Ephemeris support
Interferometry imaging improvements:– performance: automasking, exit criterion, imaging parameter
calculation– findContinuum improvement
Calibration improvement: eliminate “nearest” applycal
Detection of resolved calibrators (BP, PH)
web-accessible Jy/K factors database (single-dish)
TP Band 8 spectral line observation support
Nobeyama Pipeline:– working but still need some tweaks specific for Nobeyama data