Hardware requirements

The minimum recommended hardware is a 20-core machine with 192 GB of memory and 1 TB of disk space. Rapthor can also take advantage of multiple nodes of a compute cluster using slurm. In this mode, each node should have approximately 192 GB of memory, with a shared filesystem with 1 TB of disk space.

Starting a Rapthor run

Rapthor can be run with:

$ rapthor rapthor.parset

where rapthor.parset is the parset described in The Rapthor parset. A number of options are available and are described below:

Usage: rapthor parset

Options:
  --version             show program's version number and exit
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -q                    enable quiet mode
  -r RESET, --reset=RESET
                        reset one or more operations so that
                        they will be rerun
  -v                    enable verbose mode

Rapthor begins a run by checking the input measurement set(s). Next, Rapthor will determine the DDE calibrators from the input sky model and begin self calibration and imaging. Rapthor uses Toil+CWL to handle the distribution of jobs and to keep track of the state of a reduction. Each Rapthor operation is done in a separate pipeline. See General structure for an overview of the various operations that Rapthor performs and their relation to one another, and see Operations for details of each operation and their primary data products.

Resuming an interrupted run

Due to the potentially long run times and the consequent non-negligible chance of some unforeseen failure occurring, Rapthor has been designed to allow easy resumption of a reduction from a saved state and will skip over any steps that were successfully completed previously. In this way, one can quickly resume a reduction that was halted (either by the user or due to some problem) by simply re-running Rapthor with the same parset.

Resetting an operation

Rapthor allows for the processing of an operation to be reset:

$ rapthor -r rapthor.parset

Upon running this command, a prompt will appear prompting the user to select an operation to reset:

INFO - rapthor:state - Reading parset and checking state...

Current strategy: selfcal

Pipelines:
    1) calibrate_1
    2) predict_1
    3) image_1
    4) mosaic_1
    5) calibrate_2
    6) image_2
    7) mosaic_2
    8) calibrate_3
    9) image_3
Enter number of pipeline to reset or "q" to quit:

All operations after the selected one will also be reset.