At present it is planned to release 15APR98 in mid April. Extensive testing of the 15APR98 version in Socorro and Charlottesville identified a a modest number of bugs in the new version, some of which were also in previous versions. Hardware performance Recent hardware performance tests yielded some promising results. Full results of all recent AIPS benchmarking can be found via the AIPS homepage. New understanding, developed as work with VSOP observations proceeds, is being incorporated continuously into an electronically-accessible version.
Initial tests show a substantial decrease in artifacts for very bright, extended sources.
We are currently introducing support for shared-memory multiprocessor machines into the AIPS computational libraries. Our initial parallelization efforts are targeted at the SGI Origin series of computers, taking advantage of NRAO's Origin 200. Code written for SGI's machines can easily be adapted to run on machines that support the OpenMP standard. Many of the changes required to support parallel execution have also proved to be beneficial on single-processor systems so that all AIPS users can be expected to benefit from the parallelization initiative. In 1997, some new bugs were fixed, increasing the general robustness of the system.