PURIFY
Next-generation radio interferometric imaging
PURIFY

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Description

PURIFY is an open-source collection of routines written in C++ available under the license below. It implements different tools and high-level to perform radio interferometric imaging, i.e. to recover images from the Fourier measurements taken by radio interferometric telescopes.

PURIFY leverages recent developments in the field of compressive sensing and convex optimization. Low-level functionality to solve the resulting convex optimisation is factored into the open-source companion code, SOPT, also written by the authors of PURIFY. For further background please see the reference section.

This documentation outlines the necessary and optional dependencies upon which PURIFY should be built, before describing installation, testing and usage details. Contributors, references and license information then follows.

Dependencies installation

PURIFY is written in C++11. Required software and libraries, and their minimum supported versions, are listed below. The build system will attempt to automatically download and build the automatically included libraries. (an internet connection is required for this). Most dependencies are handled by the conan package manager.

C++ dependencies:

User-provided libraries

In order to build PURIFY, you should have the following installed on your system.

  • CMake v3.5.1 A free software that allows cross-platform compilation
  • conan v1.60.1 C/C++ package manager. NOTE Conan 2.0 and later are not supported.
  • GCC v7.3.0 GNU compiler for C++
  • OpenMP v4.8.4 - Optional - Speeds up some of the operations.
  • MPI v3.1.1 - Optional - Parallelisation paradigm to speed up operations.

Automatically included libraries

The build system of PURIFY will attempt to download and build these additional dependencies, depending on the build options passed to conan. Most of them are automatically handled by conan.

  • astro-informatics/sopt v4.0.0: Sparse Optimization Compressed Sensing library. Included as a submodule.
  • UCL/GreatCMakeCookOff Collection of CMake recipes. Downloaded automatically if absent.
  • Boost v1.78.0: A set of free peer-reviewed portable C++ libraries. Downloaded automatically by conan.
  • fftw3 v3.3.9: Fastest Fourier Transform in the West. Downloaded automatically by conan.
  • Eigen3 v3.3.7: Modern C++ linear algebra. Downloaded automatically by conan.
  • tiff v4.0.9: Tag Image File Format library. Downloaded automatically by conan.
  • cfitsio: v4.0.0: Library of C and Fortran subroutines for reading and writing data files in FITS (Flexible Image Transport System) data format. Downloaded automatically by conan.
  • yaml-cpp v0.6.3: YAML parser and emitter in C++. Downloaded automatically by conan.
  • casacore - Optional - Needed to interface with measurement sets. The main PURIFY program requires this library (and its dependencies)
  • spdlog v1.9.2: Optional - Logging library. Downloaded automatically by conan.
  • Catch2 v2.13.9: Optional - A C++ unit-testing framework only needed for testing. Downloaded automatically by conan.
  • google/benchmark v1.6.0: Optional - A C++ micro-benchmarking framework only needed for benchmarks. Downloaded automatically by conan.

Installing and building PURIFY

Using Conan v2 (recommended)

Conan is a C++ package manager that helps deal with most of the C++ dependencies as well as the PURIFY installation:

  1. Once the mandatory user-provided dependencies are present, git clone from the GitHub repository:
git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/astro-informatics/purify.git
  1. Create a conan package for sopt
conan create /path/to/purify/sopt/ --build missing

If you get an error about broken symlinks you can set skip_broken_symlinks_check = True in your ~/.conan/conan.conf file or set an environment variable

  1. Then, the program can be built using conan:
cd /path/to/purify
mkdir build
cd build
conan install .. -of . --build missing
conan build .. -of .

You can turn the various options on and off by adding flags to the conan install command, e.g.

conan install .. -of . --build missing -o cppflow=on -o openmp=on -o mpi=off
conan build .. -of .

The full list of build options can be found in the conanfile. To install in directory INSTALL_FOLDER, add the following options to the conan build command:

conan build .. -of INSTALL_FOLDER

Using CMake

If the dependencies are already available on your system, you can also install PURIFY manually like so

cd /path/to/code
mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=${PWD}/../local
make -j
make -j install

On MacOS, you can also install most of the dependencies with Homebrew e.g.

brew install boost fftw eigen yaml-cpp spdlog catch2

TensorFlow support

The SOPT library includes an interface to TensorFlow for using trained models as priors in the Forward-Backward optimization algorithm. To build PURIFY with TensorFlow capability, some extra steps are currently required. We aim to simplify the build process in a future release.

  1. Install the TensorFlow C API
  1. Clone the UCL fork of cppflow and create a conan package using
git clone git@github.com:UCL/cppflow.git
conan create /path/to/cppflow/
  1. Follow the nominal build instructions, making sure you enable the cppflow option when building SOPT ...

    ```bash conan create /path/to/purify/sopt/ –build missing -o cppflow=on ```

  1. ... and PURIFY:

    ``` bash cd /path/to/purify mkdir build cd build conan install .. –build missing -o cppflow=on conan build .. ```

Testing

To check everything went all right, run the test suite:

cd /path/to/purify/build
ctest .

Usage

The main purify executable lives either in the build directory or in the in the bin subdirectory of the installation directory. purify has one required argument, it a string for the file path of the config file containing the settings.

purify path/to/config.yaml.

A template with a description of the settings is included in the data/config directory. When purify runs a directory will be created, and the output images will be saved and time-stamped. Additionally, a config file with the settings used will be saved and time-stamped, helping for reproducibility and book-keeping.

Docker

A Dockerfile is available on DockerHub. We are currently not maintaining it, and cannot guarantee it is up to date. Use the below documentation at your own risk.

If you want to use Docker instead, you can build an image using the Dockerfile available in the repository or pulling it from DockerHub.

docker build -t purify .

or

docker pull uclrits/purify

Then to use it, you should mount the directory with your data and config files to /mydata in the container. To run the container and mount the directory is with:

docker run -it --name purify -v /full/path/to/data:/mydata uclrits/purify

That will start a shell inside the container in the /mydata directory where you can see all the files from your /full/path/to/data. There you can run purify as shown above.`

Contributors

Check the contributors page (github).

References and citation

If you use PURIFY for work that results in publication, please reference the webpage and our related academic papers:

  1. L. Pratley, et al. "Distributed convex optimization for Radio Interferometry with PURIFY". Link will be here soon!
  2. L. Pratley, M. Johnston-Hollitt, J. D. McEwen, "A fast and exact w-stacking and w-projection hybrid algorithm for wide-field interferometric imaging". Submitted to ApJ arXiv:1807.09239
  3. L. Pratley, J. D. McEwen, M. d'Avezac, R. E. Carrillo, A. Onose, Y. Wiaux. "Robust sparse image reconstruction of radio interferometric observations with PURIFY". Accepted (2016) arxiv:1610.02400
  4. A. Onose, R. E. Carrillo, A. Repetti, J. D. McEwen, J.-P. Thiran, J.-C. Pesquet, and Y. Wiaux. "Scalable splitting algorithms for big-data interferometric imaging in the SKA era" Mon. Not. Roy. Astron. Soc. 462(4):4314-4335 (2016) arXiv:1601.04026
  5. R. E. Carrillo, J. D. McEwen and Y. Wiaux. "PURIFY: a new approach to radio-interferometric imaging". Mon. Not. Roy. Astron. Soc. 439(4):3591-3604 (2014) arXiv:1307.4370

License

PURIFY Copyright (C) 2013-2019

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details (LICENSE.txt).

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.

Webpage

Support

For any questions or comments, feel free to contact Jason McEwen, or add an issue to the issue tracker.

Notes

The code is given for educational purpose. The code is in beta and still under development.