Science Tools Working Group
We did not meet this week and we won't meet next week either.
The current version of ScienceTools remains v9r1p1, although since last week we have a new release candidate (HEAD1.578). Among the differences are that the release candidate include's Jim's initial implementation of the Pass5 IRFs, in Diffuse, Transient, and Source versions. Again, Jim has posted some details of the definition.
From Chris regarding plans for the next 'beta test' by the GUG:
- Plans for a targeted beta-release of the SAE were discussed in a GSSC-LAT telecon. The time frame for the release is week 2 of Decmber 2007.
- The hmake build/install system will be implemented as part of the beta release, so beta testers will have the option of building from source, or installing platform-specific binaries.
- The pool of beta testers will be derived from both the GLAST Users Group and the LAT and GBM teams. A deadline for final feedback to the GSSC will be about 5 weeks subsequent to the release which will allow >6-months implementing changes for the first public SAE release at about mid-Cycle 1.
Data products: No new news.
Databases and related utilities
No development news.
Likelihood analysis
No development news
GRB tools
No development news.
Pulsar tools
From James, regarding Masa and his work on barycentering-on-the-fly: "This requires careful consideration in order to allow an intuitive way for users to control the new functionality, while minimizing complications for non-expert users. Also there is potential for confusion because some combinations of parameter inputs may not be valid. For example, users will need to supply RA and DEC only when barycentering, but whether barycentering on-the-fly is needs to be performed is not in general known at the time the parameters are obtained."
Observation simulation
No news. The desirability of giving each source a unique MC_SRC_ID was discussed briefly in the Service Challenge Steering meeting on Wednesday. The faint blazars in the current sky model are implemented as a population (>5000 sources) with only one MC_SRC_ID between them. This is convenient for generating definitions and much faster for generating data, but has disadvantages when you want to compare the 'truth' to catalog results.
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
No news.
Source Catalog
Did not meet this week. Jean has posted some new results on the obssim2 catalog and on interpretation of TS, in advance of next week's meeting.
Science Tools Working Group
Met this week.
The current version of ScienceTools remains v9r1p1. In the current LATEST builds by the Release Manager Jim has added an initial version of the Pass 5 response functions (designated Pass5_v0). This corresponds to Bill's 'Source' class; Jim has posted some details of the definition.
Chris et al. at the GSSC are starting to plan the next 'beta test' of the Science Tools by the GLAST Users Group (formerly GUC). This may be as soon as November.
Data products: No new news.
Databases and related utilities
No development news. Tom's server at the GSSC recently underwent an internal code review, and passed. Eric W. says that 3 nodes of the server/cluster are currently running; more will be turned on as power/cooling become available in the machine room at Goddard.
Likelihood analysis
No development news
GRB tools
No development news.
Pulsar tools
Masa and James have started to implement on-the-fly barycentering and are working out how to present that as an option to users of the pulsar tools. gtbary will still be available as a standalone tool in case anyone wants to export barycenter arrival time-corrected files.
Observation simulation
David mentioned that users (in the GRB group, I think) trying to fit simulated GRBs were having troubles that could be traced to misunderstandings about the simulations. Julie reported that Valerie (who will be at Goddard today for the latest GI workshop) is working on a revamp of the backgrounds for simulated GBM data.
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
James has fixed some bugs in APE that were found by Swift team members. In the next week or two he expects to be able to implement APE as a replacement for PIL in the Science Tools. This will have the side effect of clearing up a some old PIL-related JIRA issues.
Source Catalog
Met yesterday. Jean presented results that indicated that the DRMNGB optimizer has convergence problems (i.e., not necessarily reaching the maximum likelihood) in binned likelihood analysis. This is not a major problem - alternative optimizers are available in likelihood, and the convergence issues may be more related to the diffuse terms of the source models, which are not the focus of the catalog analysis.
Science Tools Working Group
Did not meet this week and may not meet next week either
The current version of ScienceTools is v9r1p1. The differences
from v9r1 are fixes by Jim in the st_facilities, optimizers, and Likelihood packages.
Data products: No new news.
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
From the release notes, in v9r1p1, gtlike has the DRMNFB and NEWMINUIT optimizers available. DRMNFB uses many of the same subroutines as DRMNGB but handles the derivative information differently and seems not to suffer from some of the convergence problems that Jean encountered with DRMNGB and binned analyses in the Catalog work. NEWMINUIT is an interface to the C++ version of MINUIT that is supported by CERN and shipped with ROOT. Both the DRMNFB and NEWMINUIT interfaces were implemented by Pat.
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
From Masa: "In the pulsar tools area, we went through all the pulsar tools (except for gtpulsardb) and modify them to use new class that replaces (and cleans up) their top-level application code. The work is finished successfully, I believe, with a couple of bugs identified and fixed during the work as a bonus. So, we are finally ready to actually work on the barycentering-on-the-fly functionality, I think."
This week, James closed 3 recent pulsar-related JIRA issues (PULS-35, -37, and -38).
Observation simulation
James imported v0r0p1 of gttakosim (orbitSim package) which has Giuseppe's bug fix reported on last time. I don't have any news about using or documenting gttakosim - I haven't invested the time in running it yet.
Analia reported that gtorbsim was unable to simulate orbits past a certain date in July, 2010. The time corresponded to MET 3e8, and this had been hard wired as an upper limit in the astro package, probably for some time. Toby reports that he has removed this restriction; the fix should be in the next release of Science Tools.
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
No news.
Source Catalog
Met yesterday. I was not able to attend. It includes a report by Jean on the distribution of likelihood TS in the null hypothesis, studied with Tom's test pattern data by removing source photons.