HI-Inator

Radio interefometry simulator/imager tailored for Multi-Frequency FITS images as sky models.

Download

git clone https://github.com/SpheMakh/HI-Inator

Available Arrays

Request other Arrays via the issues service.
Specify the array you want to use by its key in config file (/input/parameters.json).

Key	Array
meerkat	MeerKAT
kat-7	KAT-7
jvlaa	JVLA A Config
jvlab	JVLA B Config
jvlac	JVLA C Config
jvlad	JVLA D Config
wsrt	WSRT
ska1mid254	SKA1MID 254 dishes
ska1mid197	SKA1MID 197 dishes

Running the simulator

1. Place your input skymodel in HI-Inator/input
2. Make a copy of the example config file (example_config.json) and modify the copy to suite your needs. The modified config file is what you should provide as CFG to pyxis (without docker) or as config to make run (with docker)

Without Docker (Not recommended)

To run HI-Inator without docker you will need to install MeqTrees and all its related software. This is much easier these days (Thanks to Gijs Molenaar), see radio-astro ppa. These are the packages that will need (I may niss some of them):

1. Meqtrees Timba
2. Meqtrees Cattery, Owlcat, Purr
3. simms
4. Pyxis
5. LWIMAGER
6. WSClean (Optional but very usefull)
7. Casacore, casacore data
8. CASAPY

Once you have all these installed: you can simply run the pipeline as follows.

cd HI-Inator/src
pyxis CFG=../input/parameters.json OUTDIR=../output azishe

Then you simulation reseults--images and visibilities (Measurement set)-- should be in HI-Inator/output

With Docker (Recommended)

First make sure you have the latest docker (>= 1.3) installed (not the default Ubuntu docker.io package).

https://docs.docker.com/installation/ubuntulinux/#ubuntu-trusty-1404-lts-64-bit

Once you have docker setup, run:

1. Build image $ make build
2. Run simulation $ make run config=example_config.json

Things to note (with docker)

• You only have to run make download once
• You will need to re-build the container (run make build) everytime the pipeline changes
• The container will always be rebuilt using cached data, unless you run make force-build, in which case everything will be rebuilt from scratch.
• You don't have to re-build the container each time you modify your config file. But your config file has to be placed in HI-Inator/input/