Blog from April, 2008

Science Tools Working Group

We probably won't have a meeting this week.

Since Monday, the current version of the Science Tools v9r5p2. Here are the differences from v9r5p1. The most important change is including the pgwave package, which is used in the Catalog pipeline.

Data products: Examples of all of the LAT Science Data Products have been evaluated by the ingest system at the GSSC and the higher-level (post-L1 pipeline) products have been found to be wanting in various ways, mostly owing to omissions of some header keywords and lack of checksum and/or datasum calculations. These will be addressed to allow associated requirements to be signed off at the ISOC and the GSSC.

Databases and related utilities

No news

Likelihood analysis

No news

GRB tools

No news

Pulsar tools

Masa and James have started coding to allow multiple binary timing models in the pulsar tools.

Observation simulation

No news

User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)

Jim added a kludge to the irfs package to allow the old HANDOFF response functions to still be recognized. This was needed because the Catalog group in particular is still working with the obssim2 (SC2) data set, but otherwise these response functions are only of historical interest, and in fact soon will be donated to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.

Johann made minor changes to several packages to make them able to compile on 64-bit computers; the need for these changes was discovered by Bryan Irby in porting the Science Tools to the hmake system at the GSSC.

Source Catalog

Met last week for a discussion about source identification/counterpart assignment. The meeting was nearly foiled by EVO problems; the cross-group strategies are available for comment - now's the time.

Science Tools Working Group

We'll skip having a meeting this week; the time slot will be used for a session on source identification convened by the Catalog group.

Since last Thursday, the current version of the Science Tools v9r5p1. Here are the differences from v9r5. The most important changes relate to IRFs; see below.

If you weren't one of the 46 people in the C&A meeting on Monday, you might want to check out Toby and Matthew's presentations yesterday on spectral analysis PointLike.

Data products: No news.

Databases and related utilities

No news

Likelihood analysis

Jim's implementation of calculation of TS for diffuse sources in pyLikelihood, mentioned last week, is in v9r5p1

GRB tools

No news

Pulsar tools

Masa and James expect to start coding this week to allow multiple binary timing models in the pulsar tools.

Observation simulation

No news

User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)

See Jim's note to irflist regarding the updates to IRF-related packages in v9r5p1. Riccardo's presentation in the C&A meeting yesterday provides a synopsis.

Here are the IRF sets that gtirfs reports are available in v9r5p1:

P5_v13_0_diff ( = P5_v13_0_diff::FRONT + P5_v13_0_diff::BACK )

P5_v13_0_diff::BACK

P5_v13_0_diff::FRONT

P5_v13_0_source ( = P5_v13_0_source::FRONT + P5_v13_0_source::BACK )

P5_v13_0_source::BACK

P5_v13_0_source::FRONT

P5_v13_0_trans ( = P5_v13_0_trans::FRONT + P5_v13_0_trans::BACK )

P5_v13_0_trans::BACK

P5_v13_0_trans::FRONT

PASS4 ( = PASS4::FRONT + PASS4::BACK )

PASS4::BACK

PASS4::FRONT

PASS4_v2 ( = PASS4_v2::FRONT + PASS4_v2::BACK )

PASS4_v2::BACK

PASS4_v2::FRONT

PASS5_v0 ( = PASS5_v0::FRONT + PASS5_v0::BACK )

PASS5_v0::BACK

PASS5_v0::FRONT

PASS5_v0_DIFFUSE ( = PASS5_v0_DIFFUSE::FRONT + PASS5_v0_DIFFUSE::BACK )

PASS5_v0_DIFFUSE::BACK

PASS5_v0_DIFFUSE::FRONT

PASS5_v0_TRANSIENT ( = PASS5_v0_TRANSIENT::FRONT + PASS5_v0_TRANSIENT::BACK )

PASS5_v0_TRANSIENT::BACK

PASS5_v0_TRANSIENT::FRONT

Older IRFs (DC2, DC1, et al.) are still available and can be viewed by doing

gtirfs chatter=3

From Eric W.: "The ScienceTools tarball distributed by the GSSC is in beta test now. We have also prepared a second tarball with the GSSC version of the ModelEditor. The latter has not been touched for many months, so I expect it will get some tweaking over the next few weeks. The GSSC-distributed tarball is now supported on 32- and 64-bit Linux, and OS X 10.4 on Intel- and PowerPC-based Macs."

Source Catalog

Met last week. The multi-band method that Jean and Ludovic have implemented for MRfilter have made it (currently) the best-performing source detection algorithm. The same approach will likely improve the performance of PGWave as well. UW pointfind (which inspired the mult-band approach) is not far behind and has a performance advantage in the vicinity of bright sources. Toby described the new command-line interface for pointfit. We also discussed the current state of using the Big Run backgrounds to make resampled (Pass 5) backgrounds for gtobssim simulations.

Science Tools Working Group

We met last week (10 attendees) and probably will meet next week.

The current version of the Science Tools is v9r5. As of Friday, Navid made the standard builds available via the installer.

If you weren't one of the 55 people in the C&A meeting on Monday, you might want to check out the presentations on aspects of spectral analysis.

You might also be interested in the plans regarding Data Quality Flags that Anders prepared for last week's SO meeting but will give this week.

Data products: No news. Runs for the record in terms of delivering examples of all of the LAT science data products to the GSSC are being orchestrated for requirements sign off.

Databases and related utilities

No news

Likelihood analysis

From Jim: "I've enabled TS calculations for diffuse sources in pyLikelihood. This was disabled by default for gtlike since TS is computed automatically for all point sources in the model, and it doesn't really make sense to do this for the Galactic and extragalactic components, which can only be excluded reliably by the fact that they are "Diffuse" sources, so all diffuse sources are excluded in gtlike. For pyLikelihood, users have to actively request for a TS, so there is no unwanted/unnecessary computational burden if it can be done for diffuse sources. This is still in pyLikelihood HEAD."

GRB tools

No news

Pulsar tools

As of last week the infrastructure of the pulsar tools was almost ready to accept new timing models for binary pulsars. From Masa: "Nothing special in the pulsar tools development since the last Wednesday. James and I will detail the development plan (and hopefully start working on it) this week."

See discussion in JIRA (GRINF-38) regarding whether to add a column in FT1 recording the amount of time that the space craft has been out of GPS lock.

Observation simulation

No news

User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)

From Jim: "I've proposed to C&A (and Level-1 processing) that the FT1 cuts and event class definitions be moved from fitsGen to a package external to ST so that it can be under separate version control. See the discussion here. The new package is evtClassDefs." This factoring is important for separating software issues from cut definitions in terms of configuration control.

Pass 6 IRFs: Riccardo has checked his edisp changes. These need to be propagated to irfs/latResponse.

Eric W. has got v9r4p1 building under the HEASARC hmake system and has got 32-bit and 64-bit Linux and 10.4 OS X (Power PC and Intel) builds to prove it. These are being provided to participants in the GLAST Users Group Beta test. The builds for Mac OS X required a change in the configure script for building the CLHEP shared library. He can fill us (Navid) in if we will be making Mac OS X builds; and perhaps he already has.

Source Catalog

Did not meet last week.

Science Tools Working Group

We will meet tomorrow at the usual time.

As of last Friday, the current version of the Science Tools is v9r5. Toby noticed that the RM has not built all of the usual distributions - at least the Windows versions were not available as of Monday. Navid explained that the problem was lack of disk space on u09; he is working on it. Here are the differences from v9r4p2. The most important ones are probably in Event class handling in Likelihood - see below.

Data products: No news.

Databases and related utilities

No news

Likelihood analysis

Jim reports that Likelihood now uses the Event class handling scheme that he proposed. The changes are backwards compatible with existing FT1 files; new FT1 files will have the EVCLSVER keyword in the EVENTS extension header.

Jim also reports that he "modified gttsmap to use wcslib for defining the TS map coordinate system so that projections other than CAR can be given (Likelihood v13r14)."

GRB tools

No news

Pulsar tools

From Masa: "the infrastructure to accept multiple ephemeris models is almost done, yet James and I still have to go through a couple of issues that need to be resolved."

Observation simulation

Jim is not planning to tag a new version of gtobssim that will implement the new event class handling scheme until versions of Pass 5 or Pass 6 IRFs compatible with the scheme are available. This would mean having a set for each value of CTBClassLevel (1, 2, 3), rather than sets for CTBClassLevel > 0, >1, and 3.

User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)

Jim has updated gtselect to allow selections by event class and conversion type (front/back) in the new classification scheme.

Source Catalog

Met last week. Tyrel presented an update on studying the use of 'event covariance' information in localization of sources. Jean presented a more detailed investigation of the detectable sources in the obssim2 data that were missed by one or another of the source detection algorithms. Ludovic presented improved sensitivity of the MRfilter method from adding a third (lower-energy) band, which helps find soft sources that had been missed bfofre