2010 DiFX Workshop Agenda
Note: 8:30 AM start on Tuesday! Start times on Wed-Fri TBD
We won't be able to provide breakfast, so please come fed. We'll try to keep the coffee flowing. The Auditorium should be open by 8:00 AM with wired and wireless internet availability. Visitors: please sign in at the front desk when you arrive and sign out when you depart.
Day 1: (Monday Nov. 15)
9:00 AM Welcome (Walter), meeting preface, around-the-room introductions
9:15 AM DiFX architecture including DiFX 2.0 developments (Adam)
10:00 AM User reports part I (MPIfR (Helge),
ATNF (Chris) )
10:30 AM Coffee break
11:00 AM User reports part II (USNO (David), NRAO (Walter), Curtin (Cormac), others?)
11:45 AM Real-time
GUI correlation demonstration (Walter)
12:15 PM Group photo
12:20 PM Lunch break
1:45 PM Geodetic applications (Roger, Helge)
2:30 PM PCals and better accountability for Astronomy and Geodesy (John Morgan)
3:00 PM Any other contributed reports of general interest, discussion of user needs
3:30 PM Coffee break
4:00 PM Review of 2009 to do list and initial creation of 2010 list
4:30 PM Display, explain, update the suggestion box items; start discussion on general topics
5:00+ PM Disband for the day
No scheduled dinner plans
Day 2:
8:30 AM Pcals and better model accountability (John Morgan)
9:00 AM Delay models in the widefield (John Morgan)
9:40 AM Complex sampling, as implemented and some esoteric theory (Chris)
10:10 AM Coffee break
10:30 AM Special DiFX projects
11:30 AM Future of standards (FITS, VDIF and Vex[2]) discussion led by Walter:
12:00 PM Hardware/Software discussion led by Adam:
Cluster performance/tuning, hardware/software perils,
OS/kernel/library gotchas, Mk5 pitfalls, configuration control
12:30 PM Lunch at the M Mountain grill (walk up from AOC)
1:45 PM Tour of the VLBA correlator
2:15 PM Monitoring/control discussion led by Walter/Chris:
new performance/cpu/network info (DIFX_DIAGNOSTIC message?), standard logging, aggregation/summary?
real time monitoring of visibilities, phase cals (inc. demo by Chris)
Possibility of control of some parameters via difxmessage e.g. clocks; accountability
3:00 PM Discussion of human interaction led by Walter:
3:30 PM Coffee break
3:45 PM Discussion/investigation of bug tracking on Trac led by Cormac
4:00 PM Discussion of testing led by John Morgan:
4:30 PM Discussing useful things not currently on SVN or not currently general, led by Adam:
runmpifxcorr scripts
splitting setup into compile and run, better generalization
running versioned correlations, storing old correlations
4:45 PM Discussion on changing band references and LSB/USB conventions, led by Walter:
Potential to change all LSB to USB at unpack stage
The current perils with LSB
Potential for shifted FFTs, totally avoiding aliasing
Changing reference frequencies to band center
5:00 PM Discussion on the problems of Mark5B, led by Walter
5:15 PM Review by hand to-do list, add new requests (Adam will update webpage later)
This item should be moved up as necessary to ensure it will be done as the last item of the day, even if some of the other discussion points are moved to following days
5:30 PM End
Dinner at Socorro Springs, 7:00 PM (there will be a sign up sheet for reservations)
Day 3:
Hack-a-thon, with initial discussion covering:
Getting pcals into FITS
Potential for refactoring in difx2fits, difx2mark4
Allowing correctly formatted clock models and EOPs in vex file
Overlapped FFTs - possibilities and priority
Wednesday lunch in Auditorium (reconfiguration of tables needed 12:00-1:00)
Hack-a-thon, with initial discussion covering:
Tour of electronics lab
Hack-a-thon
BBQ at Walter's, 6:30 PM (tentative)
Day 4:
Doc-a-thon, with focus on:
Getting better description of mpifxcorr internals, including buffer lengths and layouts, onto the wiki and easier to find
Getting Walter's DIFX User's Guide onto svn (versioned) and the wiki (latex2html?)
Man pages for the various DiFX programs?
Doxygen output for mpifxcorr (first complete all methods, then put somewhere useful too)
Plus a list made at the end of the session of the remaining documentation to be done
Hack-a-thon, with initial discussion covering:
Day 5: (Friday Nov. 19)