Currently, HOPS and AIPS are the primary choices for the time-consuming
process of (millimeter) Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) data
calibration. However, for a full end-to-end pipeline, they either lack the
ability to perform easily scriptable incremental calibration or do not provide
full control over the workflow with the ability to manipulate and edit
calibration solutions directly. The Common Astronomy Software Application
(CASA) offers all these abilities, together with a secure development future
and an intuitive Python interface, which is very attractive for young radio
astronomers. Inspired by the recent addition of a global fringe-fitter, the
capability to convert FITS-IDI files to measurement sets, and amplitude
calibration routines based on ANTAB metadata, we have developed the the
CASA-based Radboud PIpeline for the Calibration of high Angular Resolution Data
(rPICARD). The pipeline will be able to handle data from multiple arrays: EHT,
GMVA, VLBA and the EVN in the first release. Polarization and phase-referencing
calibration are supported and a spectral line mode will be added in the future.
The large bandwidths of future radio observatories ask for a scalable reduction
software. Within CASA, a message passing interface (MPI) implementation is used
for parallelization, reducing the total time needed for processing. The most
significant gain is obtained for the time-consuming fringe-fitting task where
each scan be processed in parallel.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure, EVN 2018 symposium proceeding