In response to a request from the ASKAP Survey Science Teams (SSTs) to access the telescope's initial source-finding pipeline, members of the Computing team have created a test source-finder to simulate and analyse expected data sets from ASKAP.

Matt Whiting, ASKAP Computing Scientist, used his open-source, publicly-available source finder package known as Duchamp, and built on additional features to create the source-finder for ASKAP known as 'Selavy'.

Key among the new features are support for processing on large supercomputers and additional analysis techniques. Several of these new features were provided as recommendations by the SSTs, through the Source Finding Working Group - a forum that has provided a great deal of valuable input throughout the Design Study phase of the Survey Science Projects.

According to Matt, the Selavy Source-finding Service provides an interface to Selavy (which is not publicly available). "Users can upload an image and a parameter set to run a source-finding job on a small computer cluster," he says, "The Selavy Service also permits access to the numerous simulations of ASKAP observations that the Computing team has created over the past three years."

While the pipeline software is still under development, the Selavy Service has been made available to members of ASKAP SSTs, so that users can begin testing the ASKAP source-finding pipeline and get a feel for the additional features implemented for ASKAP source-finding.

Since it commenced, it has been used more than 230 times by SST members, and the service is expected to continue to assist the ASKAP development process as it moves closer to operations.

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