SWIFTCASA

SWIFTCASA is a task-based parallelisation of the standard radio astronomy data reduction package “CASA”. It allow easy distribution of processing on conventional HPC cluster through the use of a shared filesystem, and is able to scale CASA up to the limits of storage throughput relatively easily.

Motivation

The direct motivation is the processing need of SKA and SKA precursor instrument “Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array” (HERA). Here there is a high-degree of task-based parallelism based on partitioning of the input data in time and frequency which is however difficult to expose in traditional software. SWIFTCASA enables such parallelisation while maintaining easy use by astronomers through a simple and clear “scripting” language.

Link to report and software

The full report and software patches to make SWIFTCASA are available at: http://www.mrao.cam.ac.uk/~bn204/publications/2017/2017-08-casaswift.pdf

Interoperability with other software

SWIFTCASA is directly interoperable with CASA and with standard HPC environment such as SLURM scheduling, MPI libraries and LUSTRE filesystem.

Contact

Bojan Nikolic