1. CASA Users Survey Response and Progress Jeff Kern NRAO

2. CASA User Survey Response Survey conducted in March 2015 Analysis presented to CUC already Feedback to general users community via CASA newsletter article (this month) Does not include response to each comment Similar signal from EVLA User survey, slightly more emphasis on performance Executed April 2015 Results are factored into planning and prioritization Consistent input from all sources: CUC, User Survey, NRAO Users Committee 2015 CASA Users Committee Face-to-Face2

3. CASA Documentation 2015 CASA Users Committee Face-to-Face3 Users ForumCookbookCASA GuidesKnowledgebase Wksp (NRAO)Wksp (non-NRAO)HelpdeskInline HelpDeveloper 100% 50% 0% Somewhat Useful Not Useful Very Useful

4. CASA Documentation Maintain and extend CASA Guides Some structural changes to respond to user request for focus and lighten maintenance burden on SUS Restructure the cookbook / inline help to make it more useful. See earlier presentation Workshops are very informative, but obviously reach fewer people Continue to hold these to reach more users Considering an “Advanced” workshop Soliciting topics for agenda, 2015 CASA Users Committee Face-to-Face4

5. CASA Operating System 2015 CASA Users Committee Face-to-Face5 OSX is 27% of usage Ubuntu dominates Linux usage (~30%) RedHat next at 13% No Clear trend of primary vs secondary systems Week trend for 2 nd system to be OSX Second system shows uniform usage of about 20% for all major areas.

6. CASA Operating Systems Biggest signal was request for update to modern OSX versions. – Complete, we will continue to support the two latest version of OSX in the future (i.e. we’re working on 10.11 now) Binary distribution (RHEL Based) is supporting many different Linux distributions. – Great when it works, but find occasional mismatches and errors. – Contributes to “instability” reputation. Fundamentally resource constrained, the additional operating systems are not free 2015 CASA Users Committee Face-to-Face6

7. CASA Telescopes Data Being Reduced with CASA 2015 CASA Users Committee Face-to-Face7 WSRT VLBA/VLBI e-MERLIN PAPER SMA These users are not as well supported, and indeed often find errors (we don’t test against their data). Need to engage with these observatories to support their users.

8. CASA CASA Priority 2015 CASA Users Committee Face-to-Face8 Full SampleEarly CareerUniversityOptical/IR See next talk, but I think that our development priorities are well aligned with this input.

9. CASA Other topics from the “essay” question Viewer: Many requests for improvements and publication quality. – CARTA (tomorrow) is designed to address many of these issues. – Publication quality is a bit more problematic. VLBI and Fringe Tracking – BlackHoleCam has funded team at JIVE to develop VLBI pipeline in CASA. – Discussions still in progress but foreseen as integral part of CASA delivery. – Unfortunately not quite ready to be made public. Direction dependent calibration – This could actually be implemented at the python level, would be a good project for a thesis to develop and characterize. 2015 CASA Users Committee Face-to-Face9

10. CASA Other topics from the “essay” question Performance – Actually mixed input from users, some positive feedback! – HPC and scratchless operation initiatives are nearing completion. – Preparing initiative to focus on performance aspects (in particular I/O) More pythonic behavior – Python version must match version that was used for C++ binding. – Moving in this direction, but requires rework of overall interface definition and code generation process. – Part of the strategic plan but probably still 2+ years out. 2015 CASA Users Committee Face-to-Face10