There are many other system problems looming, and the success of this effort is uncertain. Several hang-ups have been identified and are currently being worked on. A data-processing path through AIPS meeting the needs of the geodesy community has been identified and is nearly complete. Further modifications to accommodate geodetic data reduction are planned. 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.