Installation

VCSBeam is designed to process high time resolution (HTR) data recorded by the Voltage Capture System (VCS) subsystem of the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) telescope. It consists of

1. A C library that can be used to create custom applications for processing VCS data,
2. A suite of programs (see Applications below).

Dependencies

• CUDA (required)
• MPI
• PAL
• cfitsio
• psrfits_utils
• mwa_hyperbeam (>=0.4.0)
• mwalib (required)
• vdifio
• xGPU

Observations with more than 128 tiles

When the MWA was upgraded from 128T to 144T, any code that depended on the legacy VCS data format tile ordering broke. This was fixed in vcsbeam v4.1, but part of the solution also depended on a fix that was made in mwalib. Therefore, when processing observations with more than 128 tiles, make sure that you use a vcsbeam version >= 4.1.0 which was built against an mwalib version >= 0.16.4.

Compiling

cmake will attempt to locate the dependencies automatically. Assuming it succeeds, a typical (and minimal) cmake command will be

mkdir -p build && cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=[target installation directory] \
      -DCMAKE_CUDA_ARCHITECTURES=[cuda_compute] \
      -DHYPERBEAM_HDF5=[path to mwa_full_embedded_element_pattern.h5] \
      ..

The HYPERBEAM_HDF5 file can be supplied upon request, if it is not provided as part of the mwa_hyperbeam library.

If some of the dependencies are in non-standard locations, cmake can be helped by setting the following cmake variables (using the -DVARIABLE=value syntax):

PAL_ROOT_DIR
CFITSIO_ROOT_DIR
PSRFITS_UTILS_ROOT_DIR
HYPERBEAM_ROOT
MWALIB_ROOT
VDIFIO_ROOT

Other optional variables can be set:

RUNTIME_DIR  -- Where to install needed runtime files (e.g. pq_phase_correction.txt)

Compilation and installation:

make
make install

Applications

The following applications are built along with the vcsbeam library. The table lists each application's dependencies ('Y' = required, 'C' = required only at compile time):

	CUDA	MPI	PAL	cfitsio	psrfits_utils	mwa_hyperbeam	mwalib	vdifio	xGPU
fine_pfb_offline	Y						Y
make_mwa_incoh_beam	Y	Y		Y	Y		Y
make_mwa_tied_array_beam	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y
mwa_track_primary_beam_response	C		Y			Y	Y
mwa_mwa_tied_array_beam_psf	C		Y			Y	Y
offline_correlator	Y			Y			C		Y

Only those applications use dependencies are all present will be compiled and installed.