Birli

A Rust library for common preprocessing tasks performed in the data pipeline of the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA), located on the land of the Wajarri Yamatji people in Murchison Shire, Western Australia.

Birl reads MWA correlator visibilities in the gpufits file format using mwalib, which supports the existing "legacy" MWA correlator, as well as the in-development "MWAX" correlator.

Birli is the Wajarri word for lightning, a common cause of outages at the MWA, and a great descriptor for the speed which this library intends to deliver.

Installation

Prerequisites

• A Rust compiler with a version >= 1.51.0 - https://www.rust-lang.org/tools/install
• AOFlagger >= 3.0
• CFitsIO >= 3.49

for OS-specific instructions, check out the linux and macOS CI Scripts, as these are tested regularly.

Installing the binary

cargo install --path .

Usage

birli -h

USAGE:
    birli [SUBCOMMAND]

FLAGS:
    -h, --help       Prints help information
    -V, --version    Prints version information

SUBCOMMANDS:
    aoflagger    flag visibilities with aoFlagger
    help         Prints this message or the help of the given subcommand(s)

birli aoflagger -h

    birli aoflagger <fits-files>... -f <flag-template> -m <metafits>

FLAGS:
    -h, --help       Prints help information
    -V, --version    Prints version information

OPTIONS:
    -f <flag-template>        Sets the template used to name flag files. Percents are substituted for the zero-prefixed
                              GPUBox ID, which can be up to 3 characters log. Similar to -o in Cotter. Example:
                              FlagFile%%%.mwaf
    -m <metafits>             Sets the metafits file.

ARGS:
    <fits-files>...

Examples

A direct comparison between Birli and Cotter might look like this.

birli aoflagger \
  -m /mnt/data/1247842824_vis/1247842824.metafits \
  -f "/mnt/data/1247842824_vis/flags_birli/Flagfile_Birli_%%.mwaf" \
  /mnt/data/1247842824_vis/1247842824*gpubox*.fits

cotter \
  -m /mnt/data/1247842824_vis/1247842824.metafits \
  -o "/mnt/data/1247842824_vis/flags_cotter/Flagfile_Cotter_%%.mwaf" \
  -nostats \
  -nogeom \
  -noantennapruning \
  -nosbgains \
  -noflagautos \
  -noflagdcchannels \
  -nocablelength \
  -edgewidth 0 \
  -initflag 0 \
  -endflag 0 \
  -flag-strategy  /usr/local/share/aoflagger/strategies/mwa-default.lua \
  /mnt/data/1247842824_vis/1247842824*gpubox*.fits

Acknowledgement

This scientific work uses data obtained from the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory. We acknowledge the Wajarri Yamatji people as the traditional owners of the Observatory site.

Coverage

This repo is approved by...