All tasks outlined for this work have been successfully completed.
[NZAPP-285] Performed research and reading up on visibility weighting schemes. Useful sources included CASA imaging documentation, Dan Briggs PhD Thesis, and RASCIL source code.
[NZAPP-286] Implemented visibility weight buffers within the imaging pipeline. At present these are stored with a configurable resolution of single/double precision. We would like revisit this in the future, to investigate the use of byte sized resolution for ingest weights (from correlator). Computation of adjusted weights (ie: uniform, robust) will remain single/double via compiler C define flag - https://gitlab.com/ska-telescope/sdp/sep_pipeline_imaging/-/blob/master/imaging/common.h#L91
[NZAPP-289] Began parallelized implementation of Briggs/Robust visibility weighting. Robust weighting can be enabled via YAML configuration file by setting WEIGHTING_SCHEME to 2 (enum driven) and ROBUSTNESS to the desired range within [-2, +2] (emulates uniform, natural, or a mixture of the two).
WEIGHTING_SCHEME: https://gitlab.com/ska-telescope/sdp/sep_pipeline_imaging/-/blob/master/imaging_configs/default.yaml#L22
ROBUSTNESS: https://gitlab.com/ska-telescope/sdp/sep_pipeline_imaging/-/blob/master/imaging_configs/default.yaml#L26
[NZAPP-304] Completed parallelized implementation of Briggs/Robust visibility weighting. Ironed out remaining bugs. Preliminary results compared to traditional natural/uniform weighting can be found on tickets [NZAPP-287] and [NZAPP-288]. The bulk of the source code for weighting functionality can be found here: https://gitlab.com/ska-telescope/sdp/sep_pipeline_imaging/-/blob/master/imaging/src/weighting.cu
[NZAPP-287] Implemented and completed parallelized implementation of natural visibility weighting (default weights from correlator). Can be enabled using a WEIGHTING_SCHEME of 0, ROBUSTNESS has no effect on this scheme. See ticket for more information/graphs/images.
[NZAPP-288] Implemented and completed parallelized implementation of uniform visibility weighting (adjusts weights from correlator by density of visibilities in the UV-plane). Can be enabled using a WEIGHTING_SCHEME of 1, ROBUSTNESS has no effect on this scheme. See ticket for more information/graphs/images.