[Difx-users] DiFX2019 wrap-up

[Adam Deller]

Hi difx-users,

The 13th DiFX users and developers workshop (definitely not an unlucky
number) wrapped up this past Friday.  I'd like to thank everyone that
attended and the members of the SOC and LOC for a great workshop.  The
group photo is currently in post-processing and will be uploaded soon!

Below I've got some details about what was accomplished and some plans for
the near- and intermediate-term future.

All of the presentations that were made during the meeting (with the
exception of one or two redacted ones) are available from the 2019 meeting
webpage on the wiki:
https://www.atnf.csiro.au/vlbi/dokuwiki/doku.php/difx/meetings/difx_2019_swinburne
.

The yearly to-do list has been updated and extended.  For the current
version, see
https://www.atnf.csiro.au/vlbi/dokuwiki/doku.php/difx/difx-todolist-2019 (also
linked from the 2019 meeting page).

As is typical, there were very many commits to the code base during the
meeting.  The conversion of existing python scripts to python3
compatibility is now largely complete (with site scripts not being
considered at this time - they are the responsibility of individual
sites.)  Given all this activity, some compilation and execution testing
would be valuable, so everyone is encouraged to get their trunk
installations up to date and take them for a spin.

One of the major outcomes of the meeting was an agreement to write and
publish a paper describing the latest version of the DiFX code, since a lot
of new functionality has been added since the 2011 DiFX2 paper.  Given the
advent of python3 functionality and outputbands, we decided that there
would be a sufficient step change to dub the next version of the code
"DiFX3", which would be a nice flourish to go with a new paper.  The paper
draft has already been opened and a skeleton outline added - you can see a
read-only version at  https://www.overleaf.com/read/rjbghsqqxykz.
Authorship of the paper is open to anyone who has contributed code or
testing over the last 8 years and/or wishes to contribute to the writing of
the paper.  To sign up, send Adam an email (or reply to difx-users) and I
will provide write access to the overleaf project.

Finally, we addressed the topic of next year's workshop: Walter Brisken
proposed that North America was ripe to host a DiFX meeting and suggested
that NRAO (Socorro or Charlottesville) could be an option.  However, we
probably want to wait and see where (and when) the IVTW meeting may be
likely to end up; hopefully there is some news on that front soon as the
IVTW is being held this week in Sydney.

Happy correlating!
Adam

-- 
!=============================================================!
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
!=============================================================!
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