ALMA SSR Committee Phone Meeting 2002-09-18

Connection Details

• Call date: 2002-09-18 (Wednesday)
• Call time: 15:00 UT
• Duration: 1 hr
• USA Toll Free Number: 888-795-6990
• Toll Number: +1-484-630-4370
• Passcode: 99640
• Leader: Robert Lucas

Attendance

Minutes

1. Subsystem Scientist Activities (all)
   • Jeff Mangum (Control): No activities.
   • John Richer, 18/9/02 (Telescope Calibration)
     This month, I have obtained and started to read the Calibration work package definition. I asked for the Project to clarify the role of Fortran 9x in the project, with particular reference to the ATM developments. I have received no formal reply. I am preparing for a first face to face meeting in September 26 and 27th in Grenoble.
   • Peter Schilke (Data Reduction User Interfaces)
   • Christine Wilson(Pipeline)
     Christine Wilson has reviewed the pipeline portions of Memo 11 and sent some comments to Robert Lucas. She has also made a preliminary assessment of which portions of the pipeline would be needed from day 1 and sent this to Athol Kemball. This preliminary assessment will certainly need to be broken down into a finer time line, probably before the PDR. She spoke briefly with G. Raffi while in Socorro about the purpose and schedule of the PDRs planned for December 2002.
   • F. Viallefond (Archive): no activities
   • S. Myers (Off-Line) see audit below
   • S. Scott (correlator)
     The correlator subsystem effort has consisted of an email exchange with Jim Pisano. The main issues are:
     • Side band separation for dsb receivers
     • Blanking
     • Calibration of data by the correlator
     There has also been an exchange with Joe Schwarz on when and where header information is added to the correlator data stream.
   • M. Wright (Scheduling) : no activities
   
   
   
2. Status of memo 11 review (R. Lucas)
   Review meeting scheduled for Sep. 24th. I had the comments (on the revised version, of the pipeline section) from Christine and will make the corrections that are needed, after the review.
   
   
3. IRAM/Aips++ test (R. Lucas)
   See current report.
   • Phase I is done, the software has worked, on one data set.
   • We are going to do Phase II in the nest two months or so, we'll get support of Athol and Kumar for that.
   • Phase III was considered as optional in the initial plan. We decided that it was needed at the Granada meeting. We will discuss Phase III details with Athol Kemball, and we have already agreed on the goals as described in the report. We should aim at having some kind of first results at PDR (December), though nothing may be guaranteed.
   • It is proposed that the benchmarks of Phase III are the ALMA benchmarks, in order not to duplicate the effort, as the largest data sets for ALMA are expected from large visibility sets, and not single dish data sets. Thus the functionalities addressed in the IRAM test should be sufficient (we should include mosaics in Phase II).
   • The SSR committee will be asked to regularly review the plan, and to participate in the definition of data sets.
   • The software developed is not only Glish but C++ as well, it uses also FORTRAN code provided by the IRAM/CLIC software.
   
   
   
4. Status of Aips++ auditing (Francois Viallefond, Brian Glendenning)
   • See the Presentation by Brian Glendenning to the ASAC
   • The audit report should be available in about one month (Athol Kemball has not yet provided his comments; Tim Cornwell's comments are included). Auditors have given grades that agree in all but 14% of requirements.
   • Christine Wilson mentioned that ASAC felt the audit was quite important. They noted that many features important for ALMA are there. They see the need to have a plan on how to reach 100% coverage of the critical needs. Naturally there will be official comments in the ASAC report (which should be available by end of October).
   
   
   
5. Date of next phone meeting October 09th 15:00 UT
   
   
6. Next face to face meeting
   The Software PDR meeting will be held, most probably in Garching, during the second week of December (the exact days are not yet fixed). As the presence of Subsystem Scientists is highly desirable at the PDR, we will have a face to face meeting on this occasion (one day is probably enough).