NRAO
 

Astronomical Image Processing System

 [AIPS]

Scheduled Releases

The development version 31DEC08 is available, the previous development version 31DEC07 is frozen, and the old frozen version 31DEC06 is no longer available for installation. CDroms of 31DEC07 will be available if necessary. The new cvs form of the Midnight Job has been very easy to use and effective in keeping numerous sites up to date. In 2008, the MNJ will work sometimes on 31DEC07 if there has been a released patch. The 31DEC08 and 31DEC07 releases are also available as binary installations (and MNJs).

TeK and message server problems

Users have encountered problems getting the TeK and message servers to work in binary installations. These servers are programs run in an xterm and that xterm must come up with some knowledge of AIPS libraries. This requires users to modify their login scripts (e.g. .cshrc file for c shell, .bashrc file for bash). See for details.

Linux compiler troubles

There appear to be problems with many of the versions of the gcc/g77 compiler suite. GNU compiler versions known not to work with AIP include 2.96, 3.0.3, 3.0.4, and 3.3.x. Versions 3.2.2 and 3.4.3 and 3.4.4 are known to work. The new 4.0.x and 4.1.x are thought not to work with AIPS, but 4.2.1 (gfortran) appears to be okay. See the compiler installation notes for general instructions on installing GNU compilers.

WHAT IS AIPS?

Also, see the Users' FAQ: answers to Frequently Asked Questions, the AIPS Managers' FAQ: answers to AIPS Managers (and installers) Frequent Questions; and our page on who is in the AIPS group. The AIPS Manager FAQ page is especially helpful if you are having trouble getting the AIPS TV to run properly or are encountering other general difficulties or wish to configure new machines and disks in your AIPS environment.

THE CURRENT RELEASE

  • 31DEC08 is the new primary development version of AIPS. It is ready for installation.
  • 31DEC07 is no longer the primary development version of AIPS. It will be patched if needed during 2008. The final report on 31DEC07 is available as 31DEC07 AIPSLetter dated 31 December 2007 (PS, 920 Kbytes) has information on all changes in this release. It is also available gzipped, (400 Kbytes) and PDF, (200 Kbytes). The 6-month progress report on 31DEC07 is available as 31DEC07 AIPSLetter dated 30 June 2007 (PS, 880 kbytes). It is also available gzipped, (380 kbytes) and PDF, (183 kbytes).
  • 31DEC06 and later releases contain a port to the MacIntosh OS/X system running on Intel cpus. This includes a full binary installation produced with Intel's compiler. An AIPSMark of 150 was obtained on our iMac which will be used to support this "new" architecture.
  • 31DEC06 is no longer available for installation. Patches have been applied to the 31DEC06 version in 2007 so that the MNJ on that version will occasionally do something useful. See PATCHES below for details. The final report on 31DEC06 is available as 31DEC06 AIPSLetter dated 31 December 2006 (PS, 879 Kbytes) has information on all changes in this release. It is also available gzipped, (382 Kbytes) and PDF, (185 Kbytes). The 6-month progress report on 31DEC06 is available as 31DEC06 AIPSLetter dated 30 June 2006 (PS, 32687 kbytes). It is also available gzipped, (5096 kbytes) and PDF, (6543 kbytes).
  • Since September 1, 2005 the binary versions for Linux are compiled with the Intel compiler version 9.0. They are compiled and linked with options that make the load modules rather large but allow them to run as well as possible on the latest threaded Pentium IVs, older Pentium IVs, and on general machines such as AMDs. Since November 30, 2004, binary installations for MacIntosh OS/X (IBM xlf compiler), Solaris Ultra (SUN compiler), and Linux (Intel 9.0) have been available. They are on the 31DEC07, 31DEC06, and 31DEC05 versions. At present, all versions provide considerable advantages over systems done with free compilers.
  • You should consider getting the new 31DEC08 version of AIPS; this is our current "AIPS for the Ages" version that will continue to be changed, improved, and have bug fixes applied. See also the section below on midnight jobs. The new MNJ works well, with no ssh required. The cvs utility that it uses has penetrated all firewalls (after allowing one outgoing service) with no problems since it provides its own measure of security. The binary installation uses rsync and then the binary MNJ uses both cvs and rsync
  • If you own a MacIntosh OS X computer, you may now run AIPS. Get either of the above versions; all contain the new MACPPC and MACINT ports. Note that the somewhat expensive IBM and Intel compilers produce code which runs about 50% faster than the code produced by the GNU compiler. Binaries compiled with the IBM and Intel compilers may be installed and updated from our ftp site. That site is maintained by our Mac computers in Socorro. Read also the special Mac installation instructions which are supplements to the A Guide to the Install Wizard instructions.
  • When you get 31DEC08 or 31DEC07, use the new install wizard; we have a good on-line guide that will help you through it. Read it!
  • The 15OCT99, 31DEC00, 31DEC01, 31DEC02, 31DEC03 31DEC04 and 31DEC05 releases of AIPS are no longer available; the number of bug fixes and differences between them and the 31DEC08 version have become too great. The continued significant demand for a frozen, even if obsolete, version was the main reason we decided to resume regular releases.

PATCHES

You really should be getting 31DEC07 or 31DEC08 instead of patching an older version!

With previous releases, we did not change the frozen release tar ball; user sites were required to download the text files and do any compilations themselves. But, beginning with 31DEC04, we provide binary releases for which user sites are not required to have compilers. Therefore, we have reversed our policy. These patches have been applied to the official code of 31DEC06 and may be downloaded using a 31DEC06 "Midnight Job". Any tarball taken after the change date listed below will already have the patches applied. Of course, you may still download and compile the files as before.

There are eight 31DEC07 patches already:
  1. REBYTE did not handle tables with long rows (IM, possibly BP) correctly 2008-01-09
  2. FITLD did not translate WR tables correctly 2008-01-18
  3. DFT model division did not set weights correctly 2008-03-05
  4. FILLM did not scale and weight cross-hand data for some baselines correctly 2008-03-05
  5. VISDFT did not do multi-scale DFT model subtraction and division correctly 2008-04-29
  6. FILLM did not set the CORRCOEF keyword correctly for recent data 2008-06-19
  7. FILLM did not apply on-line flags correctly in modes 4, PA, PB, 2BC, and 2BD 2008-07-08
  8. GO verb limited the usage of GPOS and FPOS to less than some tasks require 2008-08-13
There are nineteen 31DEC06 patches:
  1. CALIB did not handle averaging within scans correctly 2007-01-02
  2. UPDCONTROL used the obsolete sort syntax 3 places 2007-01-10
  3. UVFIX did not contain the latest leap second 2007-02-27
  4. CLCOR operation SUND did not work 2007-02-27
  5. VBGLU did not handle the PC table STATE column correctly 2007-02-27
  6. CVEL had a bad call sequence which could cause an abort 2007-02-27
  7. SNSMO had a bad call sequence which could cause bad smoothing of rates including flagging them 2007-04-26
  8. UVFIX had a frequency error for uncompressed data only and CLCOR had a minor conceptual error both affecting phases after a position shift 2007-04-26
  9. BLCAL and UVFND set the integration time to one day, causing bad amplitude calibration when there were rates and delays 2007-04-26
  10. aips.l man page had gotten lost 2007-05-04
  11. FILLM skipped a record at end-of-files which could lose data or confuse modes 2007-05-24
  12. SPLIT lost the calibration flags when a source was not found so that later data did not have calibration applied 2007-06-10
  13. SNPLT lost data from phase plots of PC tables due to failure to check for wraps and got hour angles wrong by 6 hours 2007-06-14
  14. FILLM used a blank in the middle of some station names, confusing other software packages. 2007-06-16
  15. BLAVG scaled by the sum of the weights once too often, giving bad output amplitudes very dependent on whether the weights were calibrated 2007-09-05
  16. FILLM used 2 different defaults for a nominal sensitivity recorded as 0.0. This led to weights sqrt(3) too high for each antenna affected. 2007-09-28
  17. SPLAT set the wrong IF frequencies whenever channels were averaged to make a multi-channel output. SPLIT had a similar error, but only when the channel increments were different in different IFs. 2007-10-15
  18. SPLIT set the wrong IF frequencies whenever channels were averaged to make a multi-channel output if the increments were different and got the header reference pixel wrong when BCHAN was not 1. 2007-10-23
  19. SPLIT and SPLAT copied and computed on too many correlators, leading to buffer overruns and less than optimal scaling for compressed data. 2007-11-05 and 2007-11-06
There are ten 31DEC05 patches:
  1. DBCON did not handle differences in frequency increment between FQ entries properly when changing reference channel to 1 2006-02-21
  2. DSMEAR subroutine did not handle FQ ID 0 correctly 2006-02-21
  3. SAD had an error in round off for displays of RA and Dec 2006-02-21
  4. WIPER did not handle source ID numbers correctly causing elevation et al. to be incorrect on single-source files 2006-02-21
  5. SETFC had a mathematical error in setting the X coordinate of boxes around NVSS sources 2006-02-21
  6. INTERPLATE subroutines assigned a LONGINT to an INTEGER causing trouble on AMD-64s in FLATN, OHGEO, OGEOM 2006-02-21
  7. IBLED had trouble looking for model images, defaulting NMAPS, testing errors, plotting error bars. 2006-08-23
  8. MBDLY had a bad call sequence causing aborts. 2006-08-23
  9. TABF3D did not set the correct default for column element count (1). Affects FITLD and friends. 2006-08-23
  10. CCEDT had bad logic in separating CCs into multiple separate CC files which revisions exposed. 2006-08-23

THE MIDNIGHT JOB

... will be of interest to you if you want the latest 31DEC06 and 31DEC07 versions updated nightly, weekly, or occasionally. It can do either text or binary updates depending on which sort you did with install.pl.

NVSS and WENSS/WISH Survey files for AIPS

The WENSS/WISH files have been corrected (2 July 2004) to omit the sources which are the sum of other "components" also appearing in the lists. Note that the survey files shipped with AIPS releases include the shorter lists of the stronger sources. The full lists are only available from this ftp site.

DOCUMENTATION

AIPS Memos, Reports, old AIPSLetters, the Cookbook, Going AIPS, access to the newest versions of the HELP files, search CHANGE.DOC and more. The most recent AIPS Memos are:

  • number 112, discussing the AIPS pipeline for VLA data reduction, dated March 19, 2007,
  • number 111, discussing phase referencing with more than one calibrator using ATMCA, dated January 6, 2005,
  • number 110, discussing strategy for removing troposppheric and clock errors using DELZN, dated August 31, 2004,
  • number 109, discussing AIPS on DVDs and read-only data systems, dated January 20, 2004,
  • number 108, discussing weights for VLA data, dated January 21, 2003,
  • number 107, discussing the differences between FRING and KRING, dated April 8, 2002,
  • number 106, discussing the Brandeis scheme for making movies in AIPS dated June 6, 2001,
  • number 105, discussing the new RUN file to simplify VLBA data reduction dated February 28, 2001 and April 26, 2001,
  • number 104, discussing the new Y2K performance test dated September 8, 2000, and
  • number 103, discussing data weighting in AIPS dated 2000-03-21.

MAIL GROUPS

The AIPS group maintains three e-mail exploder lists. The first, called daip, is restricted to immediate members of the AIPS group and a few NRAO scientist advisors. The other two are, however, open to any suitable person. Membership is moderated, of course, because SPAM has become so annoying.

The group intended for discussion of AIPS issues is called bananas and is used, among other things, to announce patches to the "frozen" versions of AIPS. Traffic is light. You can subscribe yourself to this list on-line.

The group intended for discussion of problems related to the "Midnight Job" is called mnj and is used to announce AIPS Manager things related to the current MNJ. Traffic is light, but the announcements can have a serious impact on any site attempting to stay current with the development version of AIPS. You can subscribe yourself to this list on-line.

FITS-IDI

The FITS Interferometry Data Interchange format is a set of FITS binary table definitions and a set of conventions for using them to transport radio interferometry data between different software packages.

AIPS MANAGER/INSTALLER FAQ

Help for the weary AIPS Installer. Very much experimental and incomplete, and probably needs updating, but better than nothing.

BENCHMARKS (the "DDT" and now the "Y2K")

The AIPS Benchmark was known as the "DDT" (Dirty Dozen Tasks); we have results for a variety of systems. A more modern test called "Y2K" has been developed in 2000 to test faster computers and to use IMAGR rather than MX. For 31DEC04 we have new master images and data sets. In addition, we have a new HUGE test using multi-resolution IMAGR on Cygnus A. Changes to CALIB and VTESS in particular forced this update, while faster computers make Y2K LARGE run in as little as 5 minutes.

DESIGNATED AIP

The former designated-AIP-of-the-week program; rotation has been halted due to the lack of personnel. The e-mail address (daip@nrao.edu) is still the best method of reaching all the members of the AIPS Group.

AIPS COPYRIGHT

AIPS is copyrighted by Associated Universities, Inc. using the GNU copright form. The full text is available with every AIPS release and may be read here.

RELATED SOFTWARE

FITS

This is the Flexible Image Transport System, and is the standard data interchange format used by most Astronomical Software, including AIPS. Follow the above reference for a very extensive set of documentataion, including a large resource list for Astronomy on the internet.

HELP!

The primary AIPS address is the aipsmail one referenced on our main Contact page, and general queries, requests for distribution tapes, documents, ftp access, and so on should be directed there. Application-oriented questions should be directed to the Designated AIP.

Modified on $Date: 2008/08/14 00:38:22 $
Eric W. Greisen