[Difx-users] DiFX-2.6 released

[Adam Deller]

Dear difx-users,

After almost 2 years on the DiFX-2.5 series, the DiFX developers are
pleased to roll out the first release of a new stable major version of
DiFX: DiFX-2.6.1.  This version has gone through extensive testing at
several locations and brings quite some new functionality as well as the
DiFX reliability you all know and love. As always, a huge thanks to all who
contributed code, documentation, testing, and funding for these efforts: I
am privileged to get to send these emails, but I've only contributed a
fraction of the work!

Only the highlights of the new version are listed in the release notes
below, while numerous other new utilities and added functionality are
identified in the ChangeLog file that accompanies most DiFX modules.
Updated, but still incomplete, documentation for DiFX can be found at the
DiFX wiki: https://www.atnf.csiro.au/vlbi/dokuwiki/doku.php/difx/start and
the users guide:
https://www.atnf.csiro.au/vlbi/dokuwiki/lib/exe/fetch.php/difx/difxuserguide.pdf.
My special thanks to Walter Brisken for keeping the user guide up to date.

The source code can be obtained via SVN at:
https://svn.atnf.csiro.au/difx/master_tags/DiFX-2.6.1 .

I'd also like to take this chance to remind everyone that the annual DiFX
Developers and Users meeting will be held November 11 to 15, 2019 at
Swinburne University in Melbourne, Australia - the first DiFX workshop to
be held at DiFX's spiritual home!  Information about this meeting can be
found at http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/research/conferences/difx2019/, and
we hope to see many of you there.  Please register and consider
contributing a talk: the SOC will be looking at registrations and beginning
to bed down the program in September.

Kind regards,
Adam on behalf of the DiFX developers


*DiFX 2.6.1 Release Notes*

Major new features

   - Improved VDIF support
   - Increased robustness in processing VDIF data with many gaps
      - Improvements in processing VDIF with frame sizes very different
      from 5000 bytes
      - New in-line reordering functionality via vdifreader…() functions;
      allows operation on more highly skewed VDIF files
      - mpifxcorr input, calc, threads, pulsar files are now only read by
   the head node and distributed by MPI, negating the need for these files to
   be visible to all nodes.
   - mpifxcorr can be provided a new stop time via a DifxParameter message;
   results in clean shutdown at that time.
   - mpifxcorr can extract pulse cals with tone spacing smaller than 1 MHz
   - Support for Intel Performance Primitives version > 9 (specfically IPP
   2018 and 2019)
   - These newer IPP versions are more readily available than earlier
      versions
      - Improved support for Mark6 playback
   - Mark6 activity messages in difxmessage
      - Support in genmachines with updated mk5daemon
      - Support playback of Mark5B data on Mark6
      - New and improved mark6 utilities
      - difx2fits: populate antenna diameters and mount types for antennas
   known to the difxio antenna database
   - difx2fits: in verbose mode, explain why files are being split
   - difx2fits: new options for merging correlator jobs run with different
   clock models
   - vex2difx: new parameter “exhaustiveAutocorrs” can be used to generate
   cross-hand autocorrelations even when the two polarizations for an antenna
   come from different datastreams
   - difx2mark4: support multiple bandwidths in one pass
   - hops: to rev 3.19 (see notes on 2.5.3 below for details on several new
   and useful features)
   - polconvert: to rev 1.7.5 (see notes on 2.5.3 below for details)

Bug fixes

   - mpifxcorr: Retry on NFS open errors of kind: “EAGAIN Resource
   temporarily unavailable”
   - mpifxcorr: Fix weight issue when the parameter nBufferedFFTs > 1
   - startdifx/genmachines: Fixes for cases when multiple input files are
   provided
   - python 2 scripts now explicitly call python2
   - vex2difx: allow up to 32 IFs (was 4) and warn when this is exceeded
   - vex2difx: support units in the clock rate (e.g., usec/sec); in general
   support time in the numerators.
   - Sun RPC is on its way out; support for “tirpc” added to calcif2 and
   calcserver

Caveats

   - Moved “mark6gather” functions from vdifio to mark6sg; this changes the
   order of dependencies!
   - Various changes made between DiFX 2.5 and 2.6 are not API-compatible.
   Please don't mix packages from these two releases. If you have non-DiFX
   software that links against the DiFX libraries, be sure to recompile them.
   A small number of changes may result in need to restructure such code.
   - There is some suspicion that correlation of very narrow bandwidth VDIF
   modes on Mark6 media can result in premature termination of datastreams.
   - The .threads file must now exist; previously (before the change to
   only have manager read these files), a missing .threads file would cause
   each core process instance to have a single thread.
   - “difx_monitor” won't compile with IPP >= 9


--
!=============================================================!
A/Prof. Adam Deller
ARC Future Fellow
Centre for Astrophysics & Supercomputing
Swinburne University of Technology
John St, Hawthorn VIC 3122 Australia
phone: +61 3 9214 5307
fax: +61 3 9214 8797

office days (usually): Mon-Thu
!=============================================================!
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listmgr.nrao.edu/pipermail/difx-users/attachments/20190828/fae4c1d8/attachment.html>