VIMOS pipeline recipes

A new release of the VIMOS pipeline recipes is now available !

A new release of the VIMOS pipeline recipes is now available for the reduction of data obtained in the Direct Imaging, MOS, and IFU instrument modes. Here is an overview of what's new with respect to the previous release (1.0, July 2004).

Together with the data processing modules, we also provide two standalone applications for running them:

Gasgano, a GUI for data browsing and organisation, providing an intuitive and comprehensive interface to pipeline recipes that are based on the ESO Common Pipeline Library (CPL).
EsoRex, a command-line driven utility to launch pipeline recipes, which can be used either as an interactive tool, or can be embedded into scripts for automating some of the data reduction tasks.

VIMOS pipeline recipes latest public version:

The latest public version of the VIMOS pipeline recipes is 2.0.2, and it is included in the pipeline distribution kit vimos-kit-1.0.tar together with the following packages:

the qfits library, version 5.3.1
the Common Pipeline Library (CPL), version 2.1.1
Gasgano distributions for Linux and SunOS, version 2.2.3
EsoRex, version 3.5.1

VIMOS pipeline recipes System Requirements

At present, the VIMOS pipeline recipes package is certified only for:

Linux RedHat 9.0
Sun Solaris 2.8 or later

You may anyway try to install and run the VIMOS pipeline recipes package on other distributions assuming that you have the gcc compiler version 3.2 or newer available.

Installing and running the VIMOS pipeline recipes 2.0.2

To install the VIMOS pipeline recipes 2.0.2 you will need to retrieve the pipeline distribution kit, unpack and install it.

Prerequisites:

To install this software package, the GNU C compiler (gcc) version 3.2 or newer must be available on your system.
To use the latest graphical front-end Gasgano version 2.2.3 the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) for Linux or for SunOS version 1.4.1 must be available on your system. If not, you may download it from ftp://ftp.eso.org/pub/usg/ohs/jre1.4.1-Linux.tar.gz or ftp://ftp.eso.org/pub/usg/ohs/jre1.4.1-SunOS.tar.gz. Furthermore, the related java executable must be in your PATH.

You may install and run Gasgano under an operating system different from Linux (find the corresponding JREs in the Gasgano web page), or use a different JRE version, but ESO cannot guarantee that Gasgano will work correctly in such case.

Gasgano is known to be resource-intensive: see details of memory and CPU usage in Appendix A of the Gasgano User's Manual.

Note:: In order to retrieve the distribution kit, you may need to configure your Web browser so that it knows how to deal with the files we distribute, i.e., tar files (.tar filename extension). If you click on one of the links below, your browser should display a file selection panel; if you end up instead with a page full of strange characters, you may try clicking on the link while holding the Shift key down, or configure your browser.

Installation procedure:

Change directory to where you want to retrieve the VIMOS pipeline recipes 2.0.2 package. It can be any directory of your choice but not:
- $HOME/gasgano
- $HOME/.esorex
Download the software and the static calibration data (line catalogs, extinction tables, etc.) necessary for running the pipeline recipes:
- VIMOS pipeline recipes distribution kit 1.0 (vimos-kit-1.0.tar, ~42Mb)
Verify the checksum value of the tar file with the cksum command. It should be:

XXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXX vimos-kit-1.0.tar
Unpack using the following command:

tar -xvf vimos-kit-1.0.tar

Note that the size of the installed software (including Gasgano) together with the static calibration data is about 90Mb.
Install: after moving to the top installation directory,

cd vimos-kit-1.0

it is possible to perform a simple installation using the available installer script (recommended ):

./install_pipeline

(BEWARE: the execution may take a few minutes).

By default the script will install the VIMOS recipes, Gasgano, EsoRex, all the necessary libraries, and the static calibration tables, into a directory tree rooted at $HOME. A different path may be specified as soon as the script is run. For instance (user input is boldfaced):
$ ./install_pipeline I am about to install the following software packages: qfits-5.3.1.tar.gz cpl-2.1.1.tar.gz esorex-3.5.1.tar.gz gasgano-2.2.3-Linux.tar.gz vimos-2.0.2.tar.gz - with the following pipeline calibration file(s): vimos-calib-2.0.2.tar.gz The software installation will be organised in bin/, lib/ and include/ directories, while the calibration files will be installed in a calib/ directory. Where should I install the software packages ? [/home/dummy] /home/dummy/pipelines Where should I install the pipeline calibration files ? [/home/dummy/pipelines] /home/dummy/calibrations
In this case the software is installed under the directory /home/dummy/pipelines, and the static calibration tables under /home/dummy/calibrations/vimos.

The only exception to all this is the Gasgano tool, that will always be installed under the directory $HOME/gasgano. Note that the installer will move an existing $HOME/gasgano directory to $HOME/gasgano.old before the new Gasgano version is installed.

Important: the installation script would ensure that any existing Gasgano and EsoRex setup would be inherited into the newly installed configuration files (avoiding in this way any conflict with other installed instrument pipelines).

Alternatively, it is possible to perform a manual installation (experienced users only): the README file located in the top installation directory contains more detailed information about a step-by-step installation.

Executing the VIMOS pipeline recipes 2.0.2

Using Gasgano

To run the Gasgano GUI, just add $HOME/gasgano/bin to your PATH environment variable:

    export PATH="$HOME/gasgano/bin:"$PATH

You should also define an environment variable CPLDIR to point to the same path specified for the installation. Possible files to update are:

    $HOME/.bashrc
    $HOME/.profile

Finally, enter the command

    gasgano
If the Gasgano main panel appears, then you have successfully installed Gasgano. Make sure, however, that the expected Gasgano 2.2.3 release is running: the version number is listed at the top of the main Gasgano panel.
Refer to the Gasgano User's Manual to learn how to browse data and run pipeline recipes. Refer to the VIMOS Pipeline User Manual for detailed information about the recipes usage.

Using EsoRex

The EsoRex executable should be available in the bin directory under your installation path (see above). The $PATH environment variable should be upgraded accordingly (similarly as done for Gasgano).
Refer to the EsoRex web page for details about the related features and options.

Testing the VIMOS pipeline recipes 2.0.2 (optional)

It is possible to test each pipeline recipe by running a number of scripts on a set of test data. To do this you need to do the following:

Download the VIMOS Pipeline Verification tar file. This file includes the data and the procedures (based on EsoRex) used for the verification of the VIMOS pipeline: its size is about 1.4Gb, that would expand to 2.4Gb of disk space.
Run the available test scripts. There is at least one test script for each VIMOS pipeline recipe, and running all of the scripts would perform a complete data reduction for each main instrument mode (Direct Imaging, MOS, and IFU). However, the scripts are independent from each others, and it's not important in what order they are run because all products are already available (for reference). With few exceptions, the scripts have the same name of the recipe that they are testing. A README file located at the top of the created directory tree contains detailed instructions about running the verification scripts.
Compare the obtained products with the reference products, as indicated during the execution of each verification script.

Documentation

The VIMOS Pipeline User Manual (2.0) (~1.6 Mb, 190 pages), is available here for download. Note that the manual is also included in the VIMOS pipeline kit, in the file vimos-pipeline-manual-2.0.pdf.

The GASGANO Users' Manual (~1.2 Mb, 66 pages) is available for download in the Gasgano web page.

On the EsoRex web page some online documentation about EsoRex can be found.

The CPL manuals are available on the CPL web pages.

In case of problems when opening the documents directly from your web browser, the files may be first saved on disk, and then opened with Acrobat Reader.

Bug Reports

If you experience an unexpected behavior of any component of the VIMOS pipeline recipes package, please, first refer to the list of main known problems, limitations and possible hints of:

the current Gasgano release
the current EsoRex release

For any other issues or requests, please, send a report to the ESO User Support Department, describing:

the VIMOS pipeline recipes package release, and the release of other components (e.g., Gasgano, EsoRex, ...) you are using
the version of your OS
the exact sequence of actions that were performed before the problem occurred
what were precisely the symptoms and the possible error message(s)
whether the problem is repeatable