HEASARC Scientific Software

1. William Pence HEASARC Scientific Software William Pence

2. William Pence HEASOFTHEASOFT is the HEASARC's unified package of FTOOLS and Xanadu scientific analysis software. • FTOOLS contains 456 individual tasks in 20 packages (estimated greater than 4 million lines of code) • Older packages written mainly in Fortran • Newer packages (Swift and Suzaku) are in C/C++ using more modern support libraries and build structures. • Xanadu consists of 3 multi-mission analysis tools • Xspec – spectral analysis • Ximage – imaging analysis • Xronos – timing analysis

3. William Pence Multi-mission Software Packages • Attitude tasks (15 tasks) • Calibration Database (33) • Imaging tasks (28) • General utilities: futils and heatools (56 + 24) • High Energy tasks (35) • General time related tasks (11) • Xronos tasks (15) • Parameter file utilities (6) Total tasks = 223

4. William Pence Mission Specific Software Packages • ASCA (40 tasks) • CGRO (21) • Einstein (2) • Exosat (7) • HEAO1 (3) • OSO8 (3) • ROSAT (35) • RXTE (66) • Swift (51) • Vela5B (5) • Suzaku (not yet public) Total = 233 tasks

5. William Pence Xselect • High-level interactive program to selectively clean and filter event files; a bridge between FTOOLS and Xanadu • Extracts images, light curves, and spectra • Products can be analyzed by the Xanadu tasks • Provides a uniform interface for all current and many archival X-ray astronomy missions • Runs many individual FTOOLS tasks for the user • also runs CIAO or SAS tools in some cases • Mission-specific information is stored in an ASCII configuration file • easy to add support for new missions and update existing missions.

6. William Pence Calibration Database • The CALDB system consists of: • a hierachical set of disk directories containing all the calibration files in FITS format • a searchable index of the files • software for users or software applications to query the database • Typical query: "Give me the name of the RMF calibration file that is appropriate for this particular observation, i.e., at this time and taken with this instrument configuration" • The software task then opens and reads the file • either at the HEASARC via FTP, or • from a locally installed copy of the CALDB files • This decouples the calibration information from the analysis software • Calibration files can be updated without any modification to software

7. William Pence Other Popular Individually Distributed Software • Fv - FITS file viewer and editor (ds9 compatible) • CFITSIO – C and Fortran programming interface for reading and writing FITS files • Both have >500 downloads per month. • Used by researchers in all areas of astronomy and other sciences, as well as by a large number of amateurs.

8. William Pence Next Software Release • HEASOFT v6.1 will be released in June 2006 • Previous release was in April 2005 • Significant new general features include: • New general image calculator tasks • Create a new image from arithmetic function of multiple input images, e.g., newimage = (a.fits + b.fits) / c.fits • Can be used with region files to, e.g., create image masks around specified coordinates • Can also apply mathematical filters to any input image in any task on the fly, e.g., fcopy in.fits[pix sqrt(X)] out.fits • New 'join' task merges matching rows in 2 input FITS tables • New coordinate converter task: equatorial <> ecliptic <> galactic

9. William Pence New HEASOFT Features (continued) • New table selection and calculator functions: • angsep : calculate angular separation between coordinates • accum : accumulative summation function • The CALDB is more selective about flagging duplicate files • Recognizes finer distinctions between • Needed for Suzaku mission • New Fv version • calculates flux within specified regions • support for new Hera features • Updates to underlying support libraries • cfitsio, ccfits pil, readline

10. XRONOS & XIMAGE Enhancements • Xronos : Planned changes • To represent the GRB curves • Adding the capability to bin by counts & log in the lightcurve. • Using the Bayesian statistic to work binning blocks • Re-write the tasks using C to facilitate : • the binning addition • the reading of the several input supported & writing of the output • portability and maintenance • Building of the individual tasks incrementally • First lightcurve task to be used with Swift (beta release maybe included with next HEAsoft release or soon after) • Ximage : changes (last and current release) • Adding support for Swift and Suzaku (psf) and psf in general • Include upper limit calculation using different algorithms • Upgrade of the AST library (FITS world coordinate system library) • Update of box rotation definition (for ds9 compatibility) • Several internal improvements

11. William Pence Currently Supported Platforms (email registrations since last release in April 2005) Total Registrations = 944 (email registration not available on Mac and Cygwin) • Linux PC (778) • Linux 64bit (76) • Mac Darwin (?) • Solaris/SunOS (74) • Cygwin PC (?) • OSF (10) • Linux Mac (3) • Linux Dec Alpha (3)

12. William Pence Supported Platforms in Next Release • Expect to add support for 64bit Linux PCs • Port is nearly complete • Main remaining issue is testing of individual tasks written in C which may not be fully 64-bit compliant • Will Try to add support for new Intel-chip Mac computers • Main issue is that the standard GNU “g77” compiler is not yet available (expect it will eventually) • Attempting to use alternate “g95” compiler, but there are complications with the C/Fortran interface, non-int loop vars. • May drop public support for the least used platforms • They remain useful for internal testing and require little extra effort to support.

13. William Pence Xspec Update • (see Keith Arnaud presentation)

14. William Pence Introduction to Hera(Demonstration tomorrow morning) • Hera is a new experimental data analysis service • It enables full data analysis over the Internet, including • High speed access to all the HEASARC archival data • Latest versions of the HEASOFT, CIAO, and XMM-SAS software packages • Cluster of 6 fast Linux machines to run the software • Large user disk area for intermediate file storage • Users only need to install the small Fv program • Acts as the client to the Hera servers at the HEASARC

15. William Pence Hera Objectives • To make data analysis easier and faster • Users don't have to install and maintain the large software packages • Users don't have to download large data sets to their local machine • To make the data more accessible to new users • The graphical user interface can guide novice users through the steps of the analysis • Hera can be customized for specific purposes • e.g., Provide lab exercises for high school and college students

16. William Pence Hera User Interfaces Four distinctly different user interfaces to Hera are available: • “Standard” Hera – the original GUI interface provides full interactive access to all features • Separate windows for managing remote and local files • Hierarchical listing of software packages and tools • Browse can save selected data sets to a Hera account • Files are saved; can continue Hera analysis later • “Anonymous” Hera – a temporary Hera session that uses the same GUI as Standard Hera. • Mainly used to immediately analyze a single data set selected in Browse • Files are deleted at end of session

17. William Pence Main Hera GUI

18. William Pence Hera Interfaces (continued) • “Runtask” Hera – the newest “batch” interface to Hera for executing single tasks from a command line. • Example: > fv -runtask fcopy infile.fits outfile.fits • Especially useful if only a few tasks from a package need to be run, e.g. The XMM SAS “rmfgen” and “arfgen” tasks • Plan to add ability to execute a sequence of commands (scripts) • Could be used to write portable analysis scripts for users • e.g. Distribute a CD containing data, Fv, and Hera analysis scripts • “Educational” Hera – developed with Jim Lochner to provide a simple analysis environment for student exercises. • Has been used in community college and a high school class settings to teach basic (astro)physics concepts. The first 3 of these interfaces will be demonstrated tomorrow.