ccontsubtract

The purpose of this software is to subtract continuum in a parallel/distributed environment or on a single computer system. The software leverages MPI, however can be run on a simple laptop or a large supercomputer.

Running the program

It can be run with the following command, where “config.in” is a file containing the configuration parameters described in the next section.

$ <MPI wrapper> ccalibrator -c config.in

Configuration Parameters

Parset parameters understood by ccontsubtract are given in the following table (all parameters must have CContSubtract prefix, i.e. CContSubtract.dataset). For a number of parameters certain keywords are substituted, i.e. %w is replaced by the rank and %n by the number of nodes in the parallel case. In the serial case, these special strings are substituted by 0 and 1, respectively. This substitution allows to reuse the same parameter file on all nodes of the cluster if the difference between jobs assigned to individual nodes can be coded by using these keywords (e.g. using specially crafted file names). If a parameter supports substitution, it is clearly stated in the description.

A number of other parameters allowing the user to narrow down the data selection are understood. They are given in the Data Selection documentation and should also have the CContSubtract prefix.

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
imagetype	string	“casa”	Type of the image handler (determines the format of the images read from the disk). The default is to read casa images and this is the only option implemented so far.
dataset	string	None	Data set file name to work with. The visibility data are overwritten with the subtraction result. Usual substitution rules apply.
datacolumn	string	“DATA”	The name of the data column in the measurement set which will be the source of visibilities and which will be updated. This can be useful to process real telescope data which were passed through casapy at some stage (e.g. to work with calibrated data which are stored in the CORRECTED_DATA column). In the measurement set convention, the DATA column which is used by default contains raw uncalibrated data as received directly from the telescope. Calibration tasks in casapy make a copy when calibration is applied creating a new data column.
sources.definition	string	None	Optional parameter. If defined, sky model (i.e. source info given as sources.something) is read from a separate parset file (name is given by this parameter).If this parameter is not defined, source description should be given in the main parset file. Usual substitution rules apply. The parameters used to define the sky model are described in csimulator.
gridder	string	None	Name of the gridder, further parameters are given by gridder.something. See Gridders for information.
visweights	string	“”	If this parameter is set to “MFS” gridders are setup to degrid with the weight required for the models given as Taylor series (i.e. multi-frequency synthesis models). At the moment, this parameter is decoupled from the setup of the model parameters.The user has to set it separately and in a consistent way with the model setup (the nterms parameter in the model definition (see csimulator documentation).
visweights.MFS.reffreq	double	1.405e9	Reference frequency in Hz for MFS-model simulation (see above)
modelReadByMaster	bool	true	This parameter has effect in the parallel case only (can be set to anything in the serial case without affecting the result). If true, the sky model is read by the master and is then distributed to all workers. If false, each worker reads the model, which should be accessible from the worker nodes. This approach cuts down communication when the model is too big. Workers can also use individual models with the help of the substitution mechanism.
nUVWMachines	int32	1	Size of uvw-machines cache. uvw-machines are used to convert uvw from a given phase centre to a common tangent point. To reduce the cost to set the machine up (calculation of the transformation matrix), a number of these machines is cached. The key to the cache is a pair of two directions: the current phase centre and the tangent centre. If the required pair is within the tolerances of that used to setup one of the machines in the cache, this machine is reused. If none of the cache items matches the least accessed one is replaced by the new machine which is set up with the new pair of directions. The code would work faster if this parameter is set to the number of phase centres encountered in the dataset. In the non-faceting case, the optimal setting would be the number of synthetic beams times the number of fields. For faceting (btw, the performance gain is quite significant in this case), it should be further multiplied by the number of facets. Direction tolerances are given as a separate parameter.
uvwMachineDirTolerance	quantity string	“1e-6rad”	Direction tolerance for the management of the uvw-machine cache (see nUVWMachines for details). The value should be an angular quantity. The default value corresponds roughly to 0.2 arcsec and seems sufficient for all practical applications within the scope of ASKAPsoft.
freqframe	string	topo	Frequency frame to work in (the frame is converted when the dataset is read). Either lsrk or topo is supported.

Example

# The measurement set name - this will be overwritten
CContSubtract.dataset                             = 10uJy_simtest.ms
# The model definition
CContSubtract.sources.names                       = [10uJy]
CContSubtract.sources.10uJy.direction             = [12h30m00.000, -45.00.00.000, J2000]
CContSubtract.sources.10uJy.model                 = 10uJy.model.small
CContSubtract.sources.10uJy.components            = [src1]
# The individual components that make up the model
CContSubtract.sources.src1.flux.i                 = 1.0
CContSubtract.sources.src1.direction.ra           = 0.00798972946469
CContSubtract.sources.src1.direction.dec          = 0.002
CContSubtract.sources.src2.flux.i                 = 1.0
CContSubtract.sources.src2.direction.ra           = -0.00511171
CContSubtract.sources.src2.direction.dec          = 0.0
# The gridding parameters
CContSubtract.gridder                             = WProject
CContSubtract.gridder.WProject.wmax               = 15000
CContSubtract.gridder.WProject.nwplanes           = 1
CContSubtract.gridder.WProject.oversample         = 4
CContSubtract.gridder.WProject.maxfeeds           = 2
CContSubtract.gridder.WProject.maxsupport         = 1024
CContSubtract.gridder.WProject.frequencydependent = false