Basic Usage

Once CubiCal has been successfully installed, it can be run from command line using:

gocubical

Adding the -h argument will print the help which provides all the command line arguments.

CubiCal can be run in one of two ways; either by specifiying all the necessary arguments via the command line or by specifying a parset file. A parset file can be populated with all the arguments required to run a specific calibration.

A basic parset file looks something like this:

[data]
ms = measurement_set.MS
time-chunk = 32
freq-chunk = 32

[model]
list = sky_model.lsm.html

[montblanc]
dtype = double
feed-type = circular
mem-budget = 4096

[sol]
jones = G

[out]
column = CCORRECTED_DATA

[g]
time-int = 8
freq-int = 8

If the above parset was named basic.parset, it could be run by invoking:

gocubical basic.parset

This simple example only uses a fraction of the available options - unspecified options are populated from the defaults. Square bracketed values are section headers which correspond to the first part of the associated command line argument e.g. the ms value in the [data] section would be specified on the command line as:

gocubical --data-ms D147-LO-NOIFS-NOPOL-4M5S.MS/

This relationship can be inverted to add options to the parset. Consider the following example:

gocubical --dist-ncpu 4

Adding this to basic.parset is as simple as adding the [dist] section (the first part of the command line argument), and specifying ncpu. basic.parset would then look as follows:

[data]
ms = measurement_set.MS
time-chunk = 32
freq-chunk = 32

[model]
list = sky_model.lsm.html

[montblanc]
dtype = double
feed-type = circular
mem-budget = 4096

[sol]
jones = G

[out]
column = CCORRECTED_DATA

[g]
time-int = 8
freq-int = 8

[dist]
ncpu = 4

Note that a parset can be combined with options specified on the command line - the command line options will take precedence, making it easy to experiment without having to create a new parset.