An AIPS-based, distributed processing method for large radio interferometric datasets

The data output rates of modern radio interferometric telescopes make the traditional data reduction process impractical in many cases. We report on the implementation of a lightweight infrastructure, named AIPSLite, that enables the deployment of AIPS interferometric processing routines on distributed systems in an autonomous and fault tolerant manner. We discuss how this approach was used to search for sources of 6.7 GHz methanol maser emission in the Cep A region with the European VLBI Network (EVN). The field was searched out to a radius of 1.25 min^-1 at milli-arcsecond spatial resolution and 1024 frequency channels with 0.088 km s^-1 velocity resolution. The imaged data was on the order of 30 TB. Processing was performed on 128 processors of the Irish Centre for High End Computing (ICHEC) linux cluster with a run time of 42 h, and a total of 212 CPU days.