Science Tools Working Group
The current release of the Science Tools is now v9r13. Here are the package differences from v9r12. Jim reports that the driver for the release was some changes to support Pass 7 reprocessing (see below) but does not include Pass 7 IRFs (all of which are preliminary at this point). The release includes the speed-up for Likelihood analysis and the new options for simulating isotropic sources that were mentioned in last week's report.
Eric W. reports that he is starting work on a port of v9r13 to the FSSC build environment. For the packages/tools that are part of the FSSC builds this will mean that a larger variety of binary distributions will be available.
Late breaking: Jean has reported that hidden parameters have a surprising feature in the Science Tools. He points out that the switch to toltype=ABS in gtlike (the default since v9r12 for this hidden parameter) will not take place if the user already has a local copy of gtlike.par with the earlier default (toltype=REL). James Peachey reminds that the FTOOL pset can be used to permanently change the value of a hidden parameter.
Data products: The full Pass 7 reprocessing is "charging ahead" at the Merit level, and the results are being checked. As of this writing (Monday evening), 1,384,014,512 events have been processed, according to the Data Catalog.
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
No news
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
Masa reports that he is continuing to work on improving the unit tests for the pulsar tools
Observation simulation
No news
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
Important update for Pass 7 From Jim:
From the user perspective, the main change is the content of the EVENT_CLASS variable in FT1, which is now filled with FT1EventClass from merit. Operationally, this means that one can now filter on event class using gtselect, e.g.,
gtselect evclsmin=3
instead of needing to resort to using fcopy (or the like) to filter on CTBCLASSLEVEL (now no longer filled in FT1). There is a related change in gtdiffrsp. Previously, one could restrict the diffuse response calculation to diffuse class photons (even if the FT1 file contained transient and source class events) by doing
gtdiffrsp ctbmin=3
Now one would do
gtdiffrsp evclsmin=3
Source Catalog
Last week the topics included unidentified sources, the pulsar catalog, the influence of the diffuse emission model on the 6-month source list, and plans for the 9-month source list, which Jean is decoupling from Pass 7.