EVLA Scripted Pipeline

The EVLA scripted pipeline applies a series of heuristics and automated procedures to calibrate EVLA observational data. Diagnostic plots and information are also written to a series of HTML pages or a "weblog".

This repository contains an updated version of the scripted pipeline for use with CASA v6 and Python v3. The pipeline should work with both "monolithic" and "modular" versions of CASA.

The pipeline is undergoing (or needs) significant refactoring to follow current software best practices. It is, however, fairly straightforward to modify, as each EVLA_pipe_*.py module is executed in turn at global scope. So to modify the pipeline, either (1) edit an existing script or (2) create a new script and add it to the run_pipeline function.

Quickstart

To run the pipeline, first clone this repository:

git clone https://gitlab.nrao.edu/bsvoboda/evla-scripted-pipeline .

and then modify the evla_pipe/__init__.py file if needed. In addition to CASA, the pipeline depends on numpy and scipy. These can be installed using pip by running pip install -r requirements.txt from the shell.

Next, enter the directory containing the ASDM file to be calibrated and start CASA if using the "monolithic" version or start a Python REPL if using the "modular" version (i.e., casatasks, etc.). Below we import the pipeline directory into our runtime path and call the main function.

import sys
sys.path.append("path/to/pipeline")

from evla_pipe import run_pipeline
context = run_pipeline()

The first startup script will query the user for the name of the SDM and a few other questions. Restarting and restoring an incomplete pipeline run has not been well-tested.

Certain individual scripts can also be re-run if they don't mutate the global state or the measurement set in a breaking way, or if one wants to simply run individual scripts for testing purposes:

from evla_pipe import run_pipeline, exec_script
context = run_pipeline()
# ... perform other actions to inspect or modify the data
context = exec_script("EVLA_pipe_plotsummary", context.copy())
context = exec_script("EVLA_pipe_weblog", context.copy())

License

This repository is copyright 2013 by Associated Universities Inc. and released under the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2. See the LICENSE file for the full license text. The scripted pipeline was originally authored, in part, by Claire Chandler, Emmanuel Momjian, and Steve Myers of the NRAO between 2011 and 2014. The port to Python 3 was done by Brian Svoboda in 2023.