Who are we?
The Technical Operations and R&D group at JIVE is responsible for several things - but in general the tasks revolve around developing, maintining and improving software, hardware, and network, to be able to advise and help internal and external users doing their VLBI thing®. It is not all software though.
The group currently has eight (8) staff members coming from a variety of scientific disciplines: mathematics, computer science, applied- as well as theoretical physics and even the odd astronomer can be spotted amongst the ranks.
Concrete tasks and software projects are:
- responsible for the JIVE Software Correlator SFXC - e.g. enabling its unique science and real-time VLBI capabilities
- the pySCHED VLBI scheduling software - wrapping and incrementally replacing well-tested FORTRAN with modern Python,
- development of VLBI functionality in the CASA such as fringefitting, adding calibration information, a Jupytercasa kernel enabling notebook data reduction, and a standalone MeasurementSet plotting tool,
- the jive5ab software for Mark5, Mark6 and FlexBuff high-speed data recorders and (intercontinental) data transfers through m5copy,
- supporting the Operations group at JIVE, build or assist in building tools to operate the European VLBI Network in all observing modes: recorded, real-time or recorded real-time; pre- and post correlation tools such as station log file processing, antab generation, data inspection and export to FITS files etc.,
- supporting the hardware, infrastructure, and configuration of the compute cluster, FlexBuff storage servers, Mark6 data transfer servers, and redundant internal network; all necessary to correlate data from the telescopes efficiently in all observing modes
- hosting and maintaining the EVN "coms" Mattermost installation that is used to communicate during real-time observations. Please contact XXXX to request access.
- provide hard- and software support hosting the archive of all EVN data since the JIVE data processor was officially inaugurated on 22 October 1998
All software is opensourced and published in various locations:
- our self-hosted github-like collaborative software development environment at https://code.jive.eu (based on gitea)
- on the JIVE vlbi GitHub account, and some personal github accounts
Other resources:
The group meets once a week in the Weekly Update of R&D Meeting ("WURM") where progress, problems and solutions are discussed and shared. The minutes of these meetings are publised online as part of the JIVE wiki at http://www.jive.nl/jivewiki/.
