Rapid Development of Interferometric Software Using MIRIAD and Python

摘要

New and upgraded radio interferometers produce data at massive rates and willrequire significant improvements in analysis techniques to reach their promisedlevels of performance in a routine manner. Until these techniques are fullydeveloped, productivity and accessibility in scientific programmingenvironments will be key bottlenecks in the pipeline leading from data-takingto research results. We present an open-source software package, miriad-python,that allows access to the MIRIAD interferometric reduction system in the Pythonprogramming language. The modular design of MIRIAD and the high productivityand accessibility of Python provide an excellent foundation for rapiddevelopment of interferometric software. Several other projects with similargoals exist and we describe them and compare miriad-python to them in detail.Along with an overview of the package design, we present sample code andapplications, including the detection of millisecond astrophysical transients,determination and application of nonstandard calibration parameters,interactive data visualization, and a reduction pipeline using a directedacyclic graph dependency model analogous to that of the traditional Unix tool"make". The key aspects of the miriad-python software project are documented.We find that miriad-python provides an extremely effective environment forprototyping new interferometric software, though certain existing packagesprovide far more infrastructure for some applications. While equivalentsoftware written in compiled languages can be much faster than Python, thereare many situations in which execution time is profitably exchanged for speedof development, code readability, accessibility to nonexpert programmers, quickinterlinking with foreign software packages, and other virtues of the Pythonlanguage.