Introduction¶
P-AIRCARS (Polarimetry using Automated Imaging Routine for Compact Arrays of the Radio Sun)¶
P-AIRCARS is an automated calibration and imaging routine for polarization calibration and imaging of solar observations done with Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) https://www.mwatelescope.org. P-AIRCARS has been developed and is maintained by solar physics group at the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (NCRA-TIFR), Pune, India https://www.ncra.tifr.res.in.
P-AIRCARS uses CASA (Common Astronomy Software Application) https://casa.nrao.edu for intensity and bandpass self-calibration and polarisation calibration is performed by our own implementation of the full Jones calibration algorithm described by Mitchell et al. 2008 https://doi.org/10.1109/JSTSP.2008.2005327.
Imaging at P-AIRCARS is performed by WSClean https://wsclean.readthedocs.io. If WSClean can not be not installed, P-AIRCARS performs imaging by CASA. When CASA is used for imaging the computation speed is slow.
Basic philosophy of P-AIRCARS is self-calibration and use the instrumental model to perform the precise calibration. Details of the algorithm and implementation can be found in the follwoing papers
1.AIRCARS (Mondal et al. 2019) https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ab0a01
2.Kansabanik et al. 2021a, in preparation
3.Kansabanik et al. 2021b, in preparation
If you use P-AIRCARS for any publication or scientific work, please cite these three papers.
P-AIRCARS has several modules and scripts. Modules can be used for self-calibration of astronomical observations also. Users who want to use the modules please read the documentation of the module details.
Instructions for installing P-AIRCARS in local machines, laptops and work stations can be found in the installation section. Implementation for high performance computing (HPC) environment is in development and will be available shortly. A basic tutorial is also included for new users.
For any queries and issues reach us at or raise an issue in github:
dkansabanik@ncra.tifr.res.in, paircarsnotification@gmail.com
System requirements¶
Minimum hardware requirements¶
CPUs: 8 cores
RAM : 8 GB
Installation space : 700 MB
Disk space : 6 times of the data volume
Workstation configuration¶
P-AIRCARS has been tested on two types of workstations with following configurations.
Intel Xeon Gold 6138 2 GHz 40 CPUs - 256 GB RAM
4 x 10TB (RAID-0) 40TB , 2 sets of 3 x 10 TB (RAID-5) , 2 x 20 TB
Boston Intel E5-2699 v3 2.30GHz, 72 CPUs
256 GB (8 x 32) RAM - 2 x 300 GB SSD System
Data 41 TB (12 x 4 TB SATA with RAID-5, 256KB stripaize)
Data1 81 TB (12 x 8 TB SATA with RAID-5, 512KB stripaize)
960 GFLOPS
Software environment¶
P-AIRACRS has been tested in the follwoing linux environments
CentOS 7
Ubuntu 20.0.4
Testing in other linux environments is in progress.
Details of other software requirements is available in installation section.