Astronomical Image Processing System: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 13:37, 9 July 2010

Revision as of 22:16, 17 August 2011

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The '''AIPSAstronomical Image Processing System''' (AIPS) is a package to support the reduction and analysis of data taken with radio telescopes. It is most useful for arrays of telescopes like the [[VLA]] and [[VLBA]] and the [[Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope|WSRT]]. In more recent years, it has also been used successfully for [[VLBI]] (very long baseline interferometry).

The software was originally developed by [[NRAO]] in the seventies, and has since grown to be the defacto standard software package in the worldwide radioastronomy community.

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A Modcomp computer in Charlottesville was the first system to actually host a working AIPS system, and it quickly spread to a guest UNIX system hosted on an IBM 360 mainframe. From there, it spread in the early 1980s to VAX/VMS systems, often with an attached floating-point systems array processor (this peculiar device was the moral equivalent of the 80387 floating-point accelerators that some old-timers may remember being part and parcel of many 386 systems). In the late 1980s, UNIX came back into AIPS' universe in a big way, first with the Sun-3 series of Motorola-68020-based systems and then with a series of others, including Cray (Unicos), Convex and Alliant systems.

By the time the 80s1980s were winding down, the dominance of VMS in the AIPS universe was being seriously questioned. Performance on new upstarts like Sun was starting to challenge their price/performance ratio, and the first SPARCstations totally blew them away. In the early 1990s, AIPS moved to a smorgasbord of UNIX variants: AIX, Stardent (briefly), Ultrix, HP-UX, SGI's Irix and DEC (oops, Compaq) OSF1. A port to an IBM 3090 was attempted, but failed due to accuracy problems with the non-IEEE floating-point format thereon. In the middle of this flurry of activity, the port to Linux by Jeff Uphoff was made.

===The Blacksburg Connection===