CASA Users Survey Response and Progress Jeff Kern NRAO

CASA Users SurveyResponse and Progress

Jeff KernNRAO

CASAUser Survey Response• Survey conducted in March 2015

• Analysis presented to CUC already• Feedback to general users community via CASA

newsletter article (this month)• Does not include response to each comment

• Similar signal from EVLA User survey, slightly more emphasis on performance• Executed April 2015

• Results are factored into planning and prioritization• Consistent input from all sources: CUC, User Survey,

NRAO Users Committee

2015 CASA Users Committee Face-to-Face 2

CASADocumentation


Full Sample

Early Career

Users

For

umCo

okbo

okCA

SA G

uide

s

Know

ledg

ebas

eW

ksp

(NRA

O)

Wks

p (n

on-N

RAO)

Helpd

esk

Inlin

e Hel

p

Devel

oper

100%

50%

0%

Somewhat Useful

Not Useful

Very Useful

CASADocumentation• Maintain and extend CASA Guides

• Some structural changes to respond to user request for focus and lighten maintenance burden on SUS

• Restructure the cookbook / inline help to make it more useful.• See earlier presentation

• Workshops are very informative, but obviously reach fewer people• Continue to hold these to reach more users• Considering an “Advanced” workshop

• Soliciting topics for agenda,


CASAOperating System


Operating System

Ubuntu OSXRedHat CentOSScientific Linux FedoraDebian

• OSX is 27% of usage• Ubuntu dominates

Linux usage (~30%)• RedHat next at 13%

• No Clear trend of primary vs secondary systems• Week trend for 2nd

system to be OSX

• Second system shows uniform usage of about 20% for all major areas.

CASAOperating Systems• Biggest signal was request for update to modern OSX

versions.– Complete, we will continue to support the two latest

version of OSX in the future (i.e. we’re working on 10.11 now)

• Binary distribution (RHEL Based) is supporting many different Linux distributions. – Great when it works, but find occasional mismatches

and errors.– Contributes to “instability” reputation.

• Fundamentally resource constrained, the additional operating systems are not free


CASATelescopes Data Being Reduced with CASA


VLAALMAOther

LOFARATCAGMRTMWASMAGBT

MeerKATCARMA

ASTE Nobeyama 45-m

LWA

0 20 40 60 80 100 120

• WSRT• VLBA/

VLBI• e-

MERLIN• PAPER• SMA

These users are not as well supported, and indeed often find errors (we don’t test against their data). Need to engage with these observatories to support their users.

CASACASA Priority


2

3

4

5

6

7

8

Reliability

Functionality

Usability

Parallelization

Scriptability

Pipeline

Data Import / Export

Serial Performance

Portability / Support for other Oss

Full

Sam

ple

Early

Car

eer

Uni

vers

ityO

ptic

al/IR

• See next talk, but I think that our development priorities are well aligned with this input.

CASAOther topics from the “essay” question• Viewer: Many requests for improvements and publication

quality.– CARTA (tomorrow) is designed to address many of these

issues. – Publication quality is a bit more problematic.

• VLBI and Fringe Tracking– BlackHoleCam has funded team at JIVE to develop VLBI

pipeline in CASA.– Discussions still in progress but foreseen as integral part

of CASA delivery.– Unfortunately not quite ready to be made public.

• Direction dependent calibration– This could actually be implemented at the python level,

would be a good project for a thesis to develop and characterize.


CASAOther topics from the “essay” question• Performance

– Actually mixed input from users, some positive feedback!

– HPC and scratchless operation initiatives are nearing completion.

– Preparing initiative to focus on performance aspects (in particular I/O)

• More pythonic behavior– Python version must match version that was used for C+

+ binding.– Moving in this direction, but requires rework of overall

interface definition and code generation process.– Part of the strategic plan but probably still 2+ years out.


Documents

CASA Users Survey Response and Progress Jeff Kern NRAO