Science Tools Working Group
We had a brief meeting this week (attendees: D Smith, J Ballet, J Chiang, S Digel, T Burnett, C Patterson, D Band, E Winter, T Stephens, M Hirayama, D Sanchez, J Cohen-Tanugi, J McEnery); we will not meet next week.
As of Wednesday, the current version of the Science Tools is v9r3p4. Here are the differences from v9r3p2. The new version has important fixes in the astro (evaluation whether GLAST is in the SAA) and Likelihood (see below) packages.
Data products: We discussed getting the current definitions of the data products in the File Format Document that accompanies the Interface Control Document with the GSSC that needs to be in place by the time of the Flight Operations Review. Most of our discussion was about the format of LS-003 (livetime cubes). David's draft specification needed to have a number of header keywords that are not currently included. You might also want to see Jim's note to scisoftlist, if you missed it.
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
Jim described improving the accuracy of the calculation of the diffuse responses and the marked effect on TS values for unbinned likelihood - he gave a detailed description in the Catalog meeting yesterday. This work resolves the long-recognized discrepancies between binned and unbinned TS values.
Jim has also added warning messages if a source model includes sources well outside the ROI of the current analysis.
GRB tools
No news.
Pulsar tools
David Smith described the discussions with the GSSC last week regarding potential enhancements to the pulsar tools. David and Dave Thompson at least were among the participants. Bordeaux will be contributing to implementing some of the requested updates.
Masa had microphone problems in the EVO meeting.
Observation simulation
No news.
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
Eric Winter (who also had microphone problems) is circulating a proposal to have Likelihood and obsSim XML model files be self identifying, using the "xmlns" attribute in the top-level element in the files. The formats are enough different that a program could figure out which is which but having an identifier at the top would make the job easier. This relates to Eric's work on an enhanced version of ModelEditor that could translate (where possible) between Likelihood and obsSim models.
Source Catalog
Met again this week. Jean presented comparisons of the performance of the source detection algorithms applied to the obssim2 data. Toby's pointfind currently has the best overall performance - see the plots that Jean posted. Jim also presented the results described above on evaluating TS in unbinned likelihood analysis.
Science Tools Working Group
We did not meet this week; we will meet next week.
As of Monday, the current version of the Science Tools is v9r3p2. Here are the differences from v9r3p1; see also Jim's notes in the Likelihood section below.
Data products: No news about the proposed updates to the definitions of the contents of FT1 and contents of FT2. David has prepared a draft specification of the format of the livetime cubes (from gtltcube) for the FITS Format Definition document. These files have not actually had a lot of attention recently in terms of binning in inclination angle - sqrt(1-cos(theta)) - but they do the job.
Databases and related utilities
As of Wednesday this week, the problems with the event selection parameters of the headers of the FITS files produced by the Astro Data Server have been solved, although the DATASERV-97 issue had not yet been marked as resolved.
Regarding the GSSC server, Tom reports: "There was a bug that was preventing the server from executing queries after an ingest. Some of you may have noticed that when you sent queries and clicked on the results page it told you you were >15th in the queue and the estimated time was negative. That bug has now been fixed and things seems to be working fine."
Likelihood analysis
From Jim:
- I fixed a bug in gtselect where it wrote the incorrect header keywords for TSTART and TSTOP. This affected the running of gtmktime on the resulting file.
- I added access to the Minuit and NewMinuit covariance matrix from pyLikelihood.
- I fixed the bug in the livetime calcuation in gtltcube where it mistakenly skipped the first relevant time interval.
- I tagged ST v9r3p2 on Monday. This includes these changes, except for the the gtltcube fix.
GRB tools
No news.
Pulsar tools
Masa reports that he and James are continuing work on gtptest.
David Smith this week posted some detailed comments on potential additional capabilities for the pulsar tools. My understanding from Masa is that the Chris is arranging a discussion this week at the GSSC about which of the proposed capabilities will be adopted for the Science Tools that the GSSC will support for the distribution to guest investigators.
Observation simulation
No news.
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
No news
Source Catalog
Met again this week. This week's meeting included a presentation from Jean about representing uncertainties in spectral fits, and an update about the list of detectable sources in the obssim2 simulation. Toby gave an update on pointlike for detecting sources and Jean presented an investigation of improving the sensitivity of the mrfilter source detection algorithm by optimizing external quantities, such as the binning of the input maps.
Science Tools Working Group
Met last week (J Chiang, D Band, T Burnett, J Ballet, S Digel, D Sanchez (LLR), W Focke, M Hirayama, C Shrader). We did not meet this week and might not meet next week either.
The current version of the Science Tools remains v9r3p1.
Data products: We discussed some needed updates to the definition of the contents of FT1 and a potential update to the contents of FT2. For the former, the proposals are to make GPS_OUT a column, to implement a not-yet-actually-real pipeline version column, and to sort out what to do about CONVERSION_TYPE and EVENT_CLASS keywords - for Pass 5 we are currently using CTBCLASSLEVEL and not EVENT_CLASS at all, for example. For FT2, the question is whether to include quaternions in addition to the RA_SCX, RA_SCZ, etc. orientation information. The pages are open for comments.
Databases and related utilities
No news. As you have noticed, the GSSC server has LEO 55-day data. Tony has got the data in the Astro Data Server as well, although (last I checked), not findable as a link from glast-ground. Both servers are incrementally updating the data as the 'downlinks' arrive. As of Wednesday, the EVENT_CLASS and time selection information in the headers of the files from the Astro Data Server needed some fixing; Jim and Tony are going to work on this, or may have already fixed it by now.
Likelihood analysis
Jim has implemented a more-accurate scheme for making the integrations over the PSFs in binned likelihood analysis - related to calculatign the numbers of expected events when the value of a spectral parameter in a source model changes. In the test cases that he ran, the effect was a reduction in TS at small values of TS by about 20% in the right direction of making unbinned and binned results more consistent. Jean also made some tests with the new integrations using test pattern data. He uncovered a bug that Jim has since fixed.
GRB tools
No news.
Pulsar tools
Masa reports that he and James have started work on gtptest, which will run a number of periodicity tests (evaluate a number of periodicity statistics) at once.
Observation simulation
No news. A splinter meeting on orbit and attitude simulation was held during the collaboration meeting. Giuseppe Romeo (author of gttakosim) and Robin Corbet were able to attend. Some follow-up questions related to LEO studies are pending with Julie.
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
No news
Source Catalog
Met this week. Most of the meeting was devoted to a discussion - really, a discussion - about naming of sources and to technical details of the contents (columns) of the LAT point-source catalog. Jean had some analysis results to discuss but I think that may have got postponed until the next meeting.
Science Tools Working Group
Did not meet this week and won't meet next week either. It was a quiet week in Science Tools.
The current version of the Science Tools remains v9r3p1.
The beta test of the Science Tools by the Glast Users Committee is now looking likely to be in January rather than in December. The date is not firm yet, but presumably the kickoff would be aligned with a meeting of the GUC at Goddard.
Data products: No new news.
Databases and related utilities
No news.
Likelihood analysis
Jim has fixed an initialization problem in gtfindsrc so that it works with models that have only point sources.
GRB tools
No news.
Pulsar tools
Masa and James report that they are working on updating the documentation for the User Workbook. The next development work related to pulsar tools is likely to be extending gtpphase and the ephemeris database to handle more timing models for binary pulsars - there's no universally used set of parameters used to specify these for binary systems.
Observation simulation
No direct news. A splinter meeting on orbit and attitude simulation is planned (and almost announced) for next Tuesday at the collaboration meeting. Robin Corbet and Giuseppe Romeo (author of gttakosim) of the GSSC will attend.
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
James reports that he "consulted with Eric Winter and Bryan Irby (of the HEASARC software team) about how to continue efforts to port the Science Tools into the HEASARC's build environment."
Source Catalog
Did not meet this week.
Science Tools Update, November 1, 2007
Science Tools Working Group
Did not meet this week.
On Wednesday, Jim released v9r3p1 of the Science Tools. Here are the differences from v9r3. It has some bug fixes in the pulsar tools (see below), but the driving factor was switching to a rebuilt version of ROOT that did not expect to find itself on SLAC Linux. The problem was pointed out by Nicola O..
Data products: Julie mentioned yesterday the extended version of the event summary (FT1) files. These are planned to be a large superset of the FT1 files in terms of contents (~200 quantities vs. ~18 for FT1) and may also be a superset in terms of the events included. The additional variables will be quantities from the Merit files, and these files will be delivered routinely to the GSSC to facilitate the extra-Science Tools use of the data. Julie has a makeFT1 dictionary file to make the extended version of FT1 and plans to use it this week to make example files from the new 55-day run.
Databases and related utilities
No news.
Likelihood analysis
Jim reports that the likelihood tools now check the IRF names in the diffuse response columns of FT1 files. Not doing this had become a more obvious potential problem with the advent of Pass 5 IRFs, which currently have 3 classes.
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
Masa and James fixed the PULS-41 (gtpphase ignores the phi0 parameter) and PULS-42 (negative phases possible) issues.
Masa is working on updating documentation for the User Workbook.
Observation simulation
Jim reports that the new RadialSource source has been tested in Gleam.
Jim fixed the JIRA issue OBS-12, that gtobssim had been ignoring the LIVETIME column in input pointing histories. Riccardo pointed out this problem.
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
No news
Source Catalog
Met again this week. Jean presented results from a new look at the test pattern data sets with likelihood analysis. One interesting result was the flux limit as a function of source spectral index. He also updated his comparison of source detection algorithms on obssim2 data, drawing interesting conclusions from studying which sources were detected by only one of the algorithms. Jean also investigated the effect of removing sources below the detection threshold in the 'time' part of the pipeline analysis. This is fairly closely analagous to what is done for source monitoring in ASP. He found that the effects on the measured fluxes for the remaining sources were typically very small. He did not measure the CPU time but by halving the number of sources the expectation is that the CPU time required decreased by a factor of 4.
Science Tools Working Group
Did not meet this week.
On Wednesday, Jim released v9r3 of the Science Tools. Here are the differences from v9r2p2. The biggest news is that the new versions of the pulsar tools have been included (see below), but the release also includes important fixes (e.g., in gtburstfit) and enhancements (e.g., speed of gtselect - see below).
Emmanuel will make a MacOSX build (by hand) of v9r3.
Data products: No new news.
Databases and related utilities
No development news.
Likelihood analysis
Jim has worked out a filtering expression for gtselect and gtmktime that applies "zenith angle cuts to FT1 data without incurring additional excessive computational cost in the likelihood analysis." In general this is a combination of applying zenith angle cuts on FT1 files and also creating GTIs to remove time intervals when the horizon would cross the ROI (or source region). Depending on the pointing history and the zenith angle range of the ROI, the time ranges actually removed can be very small. Jim is working on evaluating and refining the approach.
GRB tools
James resolved 2 of the 3 the JIRA issues relating to GRB tools that were opened during the Ops Sim and these fixes are in the new release of the Science Tools
Pulsar tools
This week Masa and James released the extensively updated pulsar tools that they have been preparing for some time. This is a major milestone. Among other changes, the tools include barycentering on-the-fly, although gtbary remains available. As mentioned last week, alternative solar system ephemerides can now also be specified. Masa plans to start work on updating the reference pages and tutorials in the Workbook. If you can't wait, he has already updated the Doxygen documentation.
Marianne traced the unexpected phase shifts of the light curves of the bright pulsars in the Ops Sim data to what turned out to be a bug in gtpphase. Masa describes the issue and a workaround in the JIRA issue PULS-41 he opened for it.
Observation simulation
Jim reports that he has "implemented a RadialSource source object that allows for diffuse sources with azimuthal symmetry to be easily modeled. This will be used to model dark matter sources for Gleam and gtobssim simulations." This will sure beat using FITS images to define the source extents and profiles.
Jim also "made minor modifications to the SpectralTransient source class to allow for neutron components to be modeled in Solar Flare simulations."
And he "modified gtobssim to allow for the SAA to be disabled to support GRB sensitivity studies." This uses an environment variable DISABLE_SAA.
Max R. reports that he is working on the code for PulsarSpectrum to make it faster and more readable, and he is also extensively testing the code.
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
Jim "added a function that calls cfitsio directly to enable efficient copying of FITS files that are filtered by standard extended filename expressions. This function is now used by gtselect and gtmktime and has improved execution speed for FT1 files of size >2 M events by factors of >30.
James reports that he "met with Bryan Irby and Eric Winter to discuss the status of the Science Tools port into the HEADAS build system. They determined a way forward in which the Science Tools would be treated architecturally exactly like all other current missions (Swift and Suzaku). The plan is still to distribute the Science Tools independently of the rest of HEADAS for the time being."
Source Catalog
Met this week. Jean presented results from comparisons of source lists from different source detection algorithms applied to the obssim2 data. Depending on region of the sky (low vs. high) and probably also the duration of the data set different algorithms perform best.
We started a discussion about updating the concept of the data flow to the Catalog analysis and on the timeline early in the mission for producing successively refined source lists and preliminary source catalogs. The principal issue discussed was the role of ASP. Iteration of the catalog analysis with the refinement of the diffuse emission model also needs some more specific attention, but that is a topic for another meeting.
Not sure where else this belongs: Juergen has made significant updates to gtsrcid in the current release - simplifying access to external catalogs and allowing for elliptical confidence regions. The documentation in the Workbook is now somewhat out of date for this tool.
Science Tools Working Group
Met this week (11 attendees).
Since October 5, the current version of ScienceTools is v9r2p2. Here are the minor differences from v9r2p1. Jim removed Mc variables from Pass5_classifier - they weren't actually used in the classifying and the change was needed to process the Ops Sim data sets. It isn't clear yet whether we'll have a new release of the Science Tools to go along with the release of the 55-day Interleaved data set sometime next week. Whether or not we do is not vitally important.
Data products: No new news.
Databases and related utilities
No development news.
Likelihood analysis
Jim has fixed a bug that Jean noticed in the Python version of likelihood, relating to how a stored best-fit result was retained even if the source model changed.
GRB tools
No development news. Some JIRA issues relating to GRB tools were opened last week during the Ops Sim. The most serious of these is that gtburstfit is not currently working under Linux. James is working on resolving the issues.
Pulsar tools
Masa reports that he and James have updated the interface to the pulsar tools to include the prompting options needed now that barycentering-on-the-fly has been implemented. He is updated the doxygen documentation in the mainpage.h files. Then Masa will work on modifying the documentation for the workbook. One result of this changes in prompting is that users will be able to specify the solar system ephemeris that they want. This is not going to be needed by casual users but could be very important for the right user.
Observation simulation
No direct news. Valerie is updating the GBM simulation code, which is not part of the Science Tools.
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
James reports that he "addressed several issues in Ape and HEADAS related to file access checking performed on file (type "f") parameters. Specifically, not all access modes (read, write, file exists, file doesn't exist) were being checked correctly in various combinations. The code now checks all cases and behaves identically on Windows and on Linux/OSX. He also rationalized prompt redirections; under certain circumstances, Ape's prompts properly go directly to the user's terminal device instead of to the standard output. Ape was behaving differently in two cases: with and without readline."
Eric reports that converting the Science Tools from CMT to hmake (HEASARC) is not as much fun as it sounds. Discussion on this topic during the meeting was more or less along the lines of producing hmake files routinely for the Science Tools - manually (I suppose) or possibly with Scons - so that a complicated and delicate conversion script would not be needed at the GSSC end
Source Catalog
Did not meet this week, but did meet last week. Jean has compiled lists of sources detected in the obssim2 data by several algorithms (none of which searched for sources that were bright for only part of the year). He is developing a quantitative way to compare their performance; this is complementary to the Test Pattern studies. Ludovic demonstrated that gtfindsrc and pointfind (UW) both work well for refining initial guesses for positions of sources. pointfind has a speed advantage and will be included as a preprocessing step before source analysis in the Catalog pipeline.
Science Tools Working Group
Met this week.
Since Sunday, the current version of ScienceTools is v9r2p1. Here are the differences from v9r2. Jim fixed a problem in makeFT1 and Navid has made some updates in the facilities package.
Chris confirmed yesterday that the GLAST Users Committee has agreed to paricipate in a 'beta test' of the Science Tools, starting in mid-December and running for 6 weeks. Chris and the GSSC also hope to recruit some HEASARC people and I think also LAT people to participate. Looking ahead to the beta test, Chris is organizing a review of documentation of the tools (reference pages, tutorials, and Cicerone) and Analia has been working on filling in some topics in the latter. Chris and the GSSC will produce a template for more-detailed documentation of the tools in the Reference Pages section of the Workbook.
Data products: No new news.
Databases and related utilities
No development news.
Likelihood analysis
Not sure where this belongs - Igor and Troy joined the Science Tools meeting this week to describe the developments they have in mind to support all-sky model fitting (likelihood analysis). gtlike cannot make all-sky convolutions accurately and for some very important applications, like tuning parameters of GALPROP there's no substitute for fitting the whole sky. Their first efforts, with Gulli J., will be to add a HEALPix binning capability to gtbin. They are also finding/implementing HEALPix convolution algorithms for fast all-sky convolutions with LAT PSFs. Jim has discussed with Gulli moving the convolution aspects of Likelihood into its own package; HEALPix-based convolutions could be used to advantage by gtlike and other Science Tools and there's some hope that we'll get there.
GRB tools
No development news.
Pulsar tools
Masa reports that barycentering on the fly is implemented in the HEAD version of the Science Tools, but the needed changes to the parameter files are still coming along.
Observation simulation
No direct news. Nicola fixed a problem in GRBobsmanager last week related to what happens during initialization if a GRB happens to be in progress at the start of a run. The symptom had been that the starting time for the run got reset back to the start of the GRB.
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
James described work on porting the Science Tools to build under Windows at the GSSSC/HEASARC, his plan of approach was modified. Jim suggested that rather than work on getting the hmake system to make Visual Studio files, the Windows versions just be built to use Cygwin. That route was rejected by HEASARC some time ago but apparently use of Cygwin has worked itself into HEASARC-supported software. It sounds like James will pursue the Cygwin approach. Eric W. has got the Linux builds with hmake almost working.
Source Catalog
Did not meet this week. In the meantime, Jean is collecting results from analysis of obssim2 data using the source detection algorithms that are under study.
Science Tools Working Group
Did not meet this week, but we will meet next week.
The current version of ScienceTools is v9r2. Here are the differences from v9r1. Enough updates have accumulated so that if you are a v9r1 user you should definitely want to switch.
N.B. v9r2 has the first versions of the Pass 5 IRFs, P5_v0_transient, P5_v0_source, and P5_v0_diffuse. You'll note in their definitions that they differ only in the cut applied to the variable CTBClassLevel. That is, these response functions are nested and (unlike DC2 class A and class B) do not partition the CTBClassLevel 'space'.
So this means that only one of these response functions can be used at a time in the Science Tools. gtobssim will accept any one of the response function sets (by name). Jim has modified makeFT1 (which makes FT1 files from Merit files) to by default apply the CTBClassLevel cut for the 'transient' class but also to include the CTBClassLevel variable values as an additional column in the FT1 files. This is so that you can use an FTOOL like fcopy to make the event selection be for source or diffuse class afterward.
Last week, Chris and David (B or D) presented a proposal for the next beta test by the GUC to the GLAST Users Committee. The presentation and minutes are not yet online; see agenda.
Data products: No new news.
Databases and related utilities
No development news.
Likelihood analysis
No development news. Jim has updated the tutorial for likelihood analysis; in particular the 'Create a Source Model XML File' section has been brought up-to-date. If you cannot wait until it is in the Workbook, it is available in the latest build of the doxygen documentation.
GRB tools
No development news.
Pulsar tools
Masa and James report that they are continuing to work on adding barycentering on-the-fly to the pulsar tools.
Observation simulation
No news. Yesterday Tom G. noticed strange behavior of some data generation runs (using Gleam) for the Operations Simulation next month. The effect was like changing the run start time during a run; GRBobsmanager may be implicated.
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
From James: "James Peachey delivered Ape to the LAT team for incorporation in the IExternal package for use in the Science Tools. Ape supersedes the PIL library which is currently still used by the Science Tools. The next step would be to deliver a new version of Hoops that uses Ape instead of PIL. After this step, many of the JIRA issues concerned with PIL problems could be closed.
James Peachey continued work on porting the Science Tools into the HEADAS Windows environment. He ran into problems with the CMake utility, probably caused by changes to CMake since the last time it was used. Currently he is experimenting with generating Visual Studio project
files directly for each package."
Source Catalog
Did not meet this week, and will make way for the Science Tools meeting next week.
Science Tools Working Group
Did not meet this week.
The current version of ScienceTools is still v9r1p1. HEAD1.581 (built on September 7) is also still the current release candidate. It differs from HEAD1.580 only in the GRBobs package, which now records more information about the bursts it generates; both of these have preliminary versions of the Pass 5 IRFs, as previously noted. Here are the differences between the most recent HEAD versions of the packages and the latest LATEST build.
Data products: No new news.
Databases and related utilities
No development news.
Likelihood analysis
No development news.
GRB tools
No development news.
Pulsar tools
Masa and James report that they are continuing to work on adding barycentering on-the-fly to the pulsar tools.
Observation simulation
No news. Max's feature article in this month's LAT newsletter includes a description of the inputs to PulsarSpectrum for simulating phase-dependent spectra.
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
From James: "James Peachey and Eric Winter began working to extend work done previously by Larry Brown to port the ScienceTools into the HEADAS build system. Specifically James attempted to use Larry's method to create a Windows distribution, starting with the external libraries. James was able to build most of the libraries, but he had problems using a more recent version of Cmake to generate working Visual Studio project files for the latest HEADAS. He is currently pursuing a work-around that will allow HEADAS to build, and will then continue with the Science Tools themselves.
James Peachey made some changes to Ape to support Visual C++ 8, then delivered version v2r2 to Navid Golpayegani for inclusion in the Science Tools external libraries."
Leftover from last week: Do we have plans to make native 64-bit builds of the Science Tools. Not that I'm aware of, but I do want to ask.
Source Catalog
Met this week. Ludovic presented more results on the improvement of source position accuracy with Toby's pointfit. Toby gave a detailed presentation of his results for finding sources in the obssim2 data set - taking into account the diffuse emission model in his analysis has markedly decreased the number of spurious sources detected. Jean presented a study of setting upper limits on expected significances of sources in the obssim2 sky model.
Science Tools Working Group
We met this week.
The current version of ScienceTools is still v9r1p1. HEAD1.581 (built on September 7) is the current release candidate. It differs from HEAD1.580 only in the GRBobs package, which now records more information about the bursts it generates. The next release, tentatively v9r2, will include versions of the Pass 5 IRFs that are designed to be used for analyzing the forthcoming Interleave dataset.
The plan at the GSSC is still for the next beta test by the GLAST Users Committee to take place in early December. Chris will be presenting the plan to the GUC next Monday, who either will or won't have other ideas about what should be done. The plan for the GSSC is to refer the GUC users to the User Workbook for documentation - and to work on cleaning up and updating documentation between now and December.
Data products: No new news.
Databases and related utilities
No development news.
Likelihood analysis
A couple of weeks ago, Toby added the package diffuse to the Science Tools. This looks like it can make allsky images, and write FITS files of them. It doesn't build any applications but is used by Toby's pointlike package, which does build an application called pointfind. The latter is not an FTOOL and does not have documentation in an obvious (to me, as I write this) location, and I didn't see it coming, but it is certainly related to the work Toby has been doing on source detection and characterization; the Catalog pipeline is using pointlike for refining the positions of candidate sources before they are run through standard likelihood analysis.
GRB tools
No development news.
Pulsar tools
James reports that he and Masa "continued to work on adding barycentering on-the-fly to the pulsar tools. Specifically, this week they began work to make the C code by Arnold Rots available through the new interfaces used by the pulsar tools libraries."
Observation simulation
See note above about GRBbos
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
gtgraph is now being built with the LATEST builds. According to James' documentation, "Gtgraph is a rudimentary package for plotting arbitrary combinations of fits columns in 2 and 3 dimensional plots. This was originally a test application for st_graph. It is not under active development." I haven't tried it myself and didn't know it was coming, although a plotting utility that would make people less likely to hate FITS files would be welcome. [gtgraph has actually been included in the ST LATEST builds since January 2005 - JC]
James and Eric W. have started working on automating porting the Science Tools from CMT to the HEASARC's hmake build system. They want to have this working in advance of the next GUC beta test.
Eric asked whether we have plans to make native 64-bit builds of the Science Tools. Not that I'm aware of, but I do want to ask.
Source Catalog
Did not meet this week.
Science Tools Working Group
We did not meet this week.
The current version of ScienceTools is still v9r1p1, and with HEAD1.580 remains poised for the next release.
Data products: No new news.
Databases and related utilities
No development news.
Likelihood analysis
- bug-fixes
- gtmodel now correctly produces output maps with image datatypes of float when the input counts cube map has datatype of integer (LK-35)
- The NewMinuit interface to the C++ version of Minuit did not account for parameter name collisions for spectral components from different sources. This is now fixed in optimizers v2r11.
- new functionality
- The best-fit parameters that have been found are stored so that when optimizers exit with an exception, thereby often leaving the parameters at a non-optimal set, the user now has the option of restoring the best fit values that have been found so far. This is available in pyLikelihood v1r1p2.
GRB tools
No development news.
Pulsar tools
No development news.
Observation simulation
- bug-fixes
- Toby modified the SimpleSpectrum source in the flux package so that it can model sources with photon spectral indices of exactly zero.
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
No news.
Source Catalog
Met briefly this week. Jean posted some updates to his investigations of the TS, Flux and spectral index distributions produced by Likelihood fits of the obssim2 data.
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.