CASA (Common Astronomy Software Applications package) is a software package developed to calibrate and image data from ALMA and other arrays. It can be used to both calibrate and image SMA data.

Converting SMA data to CASA Format

If you wish you do any reduction using CASA you will need to convert SMA data into a CASA compatible format. You can find a description of the options at Converting SMA Data Format.

CASA on RTDC Computers

The link below lists where to find the different versions of CASA on the RTDC and CF computers. The latest release will be aliased to the casa command unless you overwrite that in your own setup files.

Accessing CASA on RTDC computers

Be sure you do not run CASA on NFS mounted disks as this will slow it down considerably. CASA is partly multi-threaded so many of the tasks can be run in parallel.

The Status of Processing SMA Data with CASA

The release of pyuvdata now allows users to easily convert raw SMA data into casa measurement sets. This conversion is not without its cavceats however:
• CASA struggles to derive solutions for solor system based flux calibrators. This can make flux calibration using planets, the common method with the SMA, somewhat challenging. Users may wish to use a stable gain calibrator for flux calibration.
• CASA is currently unable to handle SMA polarization data.
• CASA doesn not record system temperatures in the same way. If system temperatures are applied by pyuvdata, these permanently change the visibilites, rather than being written to reverable gains tables.

Parallelization Tests

With CASA becoming the software of choice for imaging SMA data, there is a demand to speed up the process. As such we are conducting a series of tests to assess the parallelization of CASA using their inbuilt mpicasa framework.

Checking the output of parallelized tclean with CASA 5.3.0
Checking the output of parallelized tclean with CASA 5.1.2
Testing the best way to run CASA on RTDC
Instructions for running CASA in parallel