[asac] Documentation on ALMA software

[Richard Hills]

Dear All,

Regarding Board charge 1, there is now a package of documentation 
available on Brian Glendenning's web space.

Please see: http://www.aoc.nrao.edu/~bglenden/ASAC/

He suggests that committee members download the documents from there.
The whole set is available as a zip, but it is large (~40Mb) so unless 
you have a fast link it may be best to browse the individual files.

You will see that most of the documents relate to the review which took 
place in May 2007.  The first thing that everybody should look at is the 
panel report and the response to it.  I think you have to look quite 
carefully at the report to see what it is that the panel were really 
worried about.  Most of the rest are the papers that were prepared for 
that review.  These certainly give a flavour for just how large an 
enterprise the ALMA software is, but it is hard to "see the wood for the 
trees".  You may want to designate individual members of committee to 
look into each area.

For more recent developments, the only thing we have at the moment are 
the reports of progress at the ATF.  This series was started when the 
transition occurred to the current phase of work there, which gives 
priority to software testing.  I have added the first two reports in 
that sequence to this e-mail for completeness.  Again there is a lot of 
detail in here but I hope these give some impression of the progress 
that is being made on getting the software to the point where it can run 
the system and that it is very hard work.  Don't miss the Science IPT 
comments that are at the ends of these reports.

Remember that for this charge one of the important inputs will be from 
people outside the project who are trying out the beta release of CASA. 
  I think that we need to get that feedback into a meaningful form as 
possible -  e.g. at least some notes on good and bad features and, where 
possible, quantitative statements about performance and the like.  I 
hope that the designated testers are being made away of this need and 
the dates of the various meetings.

Best Richard

-- 
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Richard Hills                Phone: +56 2 467 6175
ALMA Project Scientist       Fax:   +56 2 467 6101
Av El Golf 40, Piso 18       ESO:  +49 89 3200 6127 (this week only)
Santiago, Chile              Mobile +56 97 608 1582
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