CASA Strategic Plan Subtitle Jeff Kern NRAO

CASA Global Context The CASA strategic plan describes the evolution of CASA over second half of the decade. During this period: – VLA and ALMA are in full operations. – Next generation arrays are in planning and early commissioning phases SKA, ngVLA, SKA pathfinders, Low Frequency Arrays – The VLA Sky Survey has started and early epochs of data are available Currently in Director’s Review CASA is a flexible data reduction package, supporting multiple paths for reduction and analysis of data. – Narrow focused pipelines can make optimizations that CASA cannot and should be faster. – Development of heuristics, commissioning, and expert reduction will continue to require a package like CASA CASA Users Committee Face-to-Face

CASA CASA Fundamental Mission CASA’s fundamental mission is the support of data reduction and analysis of data from VLA and ALMA. – Implementation of algorithms for this parameter space. Imaging Algorithms Calibration Algorithms Auto-flagging of RFI – Support for new observing modes. – Performance improvements Serial Performance Cluster support Cloud Computing (NRAO, AWS, XSEDE) 2015 CASA Users Committee Face-to-Face3

CASA Usage Patterns CASA will be used both interactively by expert users, and automatically in NRAO and ALMA pipelines. Interactive users will find CASA to be reliable, high performance, and well documented. CASA pipeline produced images will often be sufficient for scientific analysis, although it will be possible to re-execute the pipeline with “tweaked” parameters for those users expert enough to improve the output CASA Users Committee Face-to-Face

CASA Performance CASA will be packaged to execute efficiently on… – ALMA and NRAO in-house computational facilities – Selected national and international cloud and HPC providers. For computationally expensive algorithms, CASA single task performance will scale well to 20 nodes (300+ cores) on clusters with fast parallel filesystems. – This will be sufficient for ALMA and the VLA at significantly higher data rates than those telescopes produce today. Continued support for desktop/laptop systems CASA Users Committee Face-to-Face

CASA Community Involvement CASA source code will continue to be available to all under an open source license. Third party contributions can be distributed independently of NRAO and easily added to the CASA distribution. Alternatively they may be distributed with the main CASA release – Support the mission of the NRAO, and are deemed to have sufficient interest to warrant the maintenance investment. – Have been developed compatibly with CASA development conventions (documentation, testing, etc.) CASA Users Committee Face-to-Face

CASA CASA Core Update CASA will undertake a refurbishment of the casacore libraries. – NRAO will seek to form a worldwide partnership for this effort. – Parts of CASACore are now more than 20 years old – Designed in an era of single core computers, not thread safe. – Balance between I/O, memory, and compute speed has changed since design. – Does not scale well to massively parallel computing Finer granularity than current data parallel approach. – Portions effectively have no maintainer, others have single points of failure CASA Users Committee Face-to-Face

CASA CASA Processes Over the past three months Eduardo Miranda from the Institute for Software Research at Carnegie Mellon University has conducted an analysis of the CASA project. – Focus on processes (CMMI) and recommendations to improve the process. – Interview with development team, management, and scientists within NRAO Resulting report will be made public, but was only received Sept. 29 – Want to have time for the team to digest and respond to recommendations before it becomes part of public discourse CASA Users Committee Face-to-Face

CASA Recommendations 1.Implement alternate periods of development and housekeeping 2.Strengthening the authority of the software architect, Project Manager and Project Scientists 3.Establish processes 4.Institute quality assurance function 5.Collocating team members 6.Start repaying CASA’s technical debt 7.CASA Roadmap 8.Workload management policy 9.Scheduling policy 10.Early estimation process 11.Master schedule and resource availability data bases 12.Verifying the quality of work requests 13.Planning and tracking 14.Requirements traceability 15.Additions to the proposed testing framework 16.Training 2015 © Eduardo Miranda 2015 CASA Users Committee Face-to-Face

CASA Start repaying CASA’s technical debt The ever increasing difficulty of making changes diminish the productivity of team forcing them to take new shortcuts, compounding this way the situation and making them less responsive to user requests Use a tool like Coverity Architecture Analysis, Lattix or Structure101 to: – Reconstruct the design of the CASA code – Guide the refactoring effort and – Enforce design rules and follow the evolution of the code base Mandate coding guidelines for C++ and Python Conduct an analysis of the code base and the change history to identify the highest volatility components and those most fault prone to prioritize any refactoring effort Refactor the code Set up a common development environment, including the use of static analysis tool Include automatic quality gates in the check-in procedure 2015 © Eduardo Miranda

CASA Introduce a Quality Assurance function Compliance – Processes, activities and tasks that comprise the life cycle are undertaken as prescribed in procedures and work instructions; – Required management information is reported; – Intermediate deliverables accord with declared standards and structures – Corrective action are brought to closure and that controls exist and are effective – Output products conform to the standards defined for them. – Escalate non compliances to senior management Process sustenance – Communicate quality assurance activities and results – Collect measurements and prepare indicators – Conduct customer satisfaction survey on behalf of the CUC – Maintain a team balance score card – Facilitate process improvement – Maintain the process library – Curator for the CASA software web site 2015 © Eduardo Miranda

CASA Planning and tracking Critical bugs – No explicit plan; risk management limited to identification of things that could go wrong; report on single task status – Preempt other work Jobs – No explicit plan; risk management limited to identification of things that could go wrong; report on single task status – Executed as scheduled Projects – Time-boxed with feature prioritization; explicit milestones, risk identification with avoidance and mitigation responses, contingencies implicit in the feature prioritization; reporting at the milestone level – Executed as scheduled Research projects – Time-boxed; iterative process, regular toll-gates to monitor progress and sponsor commitment, terminated if any of those falter; risk implicit in the iteration mechanism; if continuation beyond the allocated time-box is required must resubmit proposal – Executed as scheduled 2015 © Eduardo Miranda