Translating ALMA User Science Goals into Pipeline Processing Requests

Lindsey Davis (National Radio Astronomy Observatory), Dirk Muders (MPIfR), Elizabeth Humphries (ESO), Stephane Leon Tanne (ALMA), Felix Stoehr (ESO), Baltasar Vila vilaro (ALMA), Maseo Saito (NOAJ)


Capturing ALMA user science goals at proposal submission time and factoring
them into a set of standard pipeline processing units and a set of
standard observing units is key to the operation of the ALMA science pipeline.
ALMA science goals consist of a set of high level science goals, e.g. an
astrometry project or a line survey project, a set of science target
instrument setups, a calibration strategy, and a set of performance goals.
ALMA pipeline processing units, called observing unit sets (OUSs),
consist of a group of observations than can be processed together in
a standard manner. Observing units are called scheduling blocks (SBs).
OUSs may contain either one or more OUSs or one or more SBs but not both.
Using a standard set of pipeline processing use cases, the user science
goals are factored into a set of OUSs and SBs. Pipeline processing is
triggered when all the SBs below an OUS has been fully observed or all the
child OUSs have been fully processed.

The science goal to OUSs / SBs factoring scheme must satisfy the following
requirements: 1) capture the scientific intent, 2) deliver the pipeline
result to the ALMA archive, the ALMA quality assurance team, and the PIs in
as timely a manner as possible and in a standard format, and 3) keep the
standard OUS / SB structures as simple and uniform as possible. In addition to
this each OUS must encapsulate the meta data the science pipeline needs to
generate a pipeline processing request.

In this paper we describe the ALMA science goal to OUS / SB factoring proposal
and the use cases supporting it, outline the meta data required to
construct the pipeline processing requests, and outline the form of the
ALMA pipeline processing request.

Paper ID: P029

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