ADASS XXXI

The stimela software package (Makhathini 2018) was designed to address a glaring problem in radio astronomy software, namely, the rigid nature of data reduction pipelines, and the heterogeneous and often conflicting dependencies of the software packages involved. Stimela is a containerization and workflow management framework. More specifically, it addresses the cumbersome process of having to craft the perfect computing environment one needed to interface more than one software package for a particular data reduction. Stimela leverages container technology, as well as a modular Python-based approach, to provide a unified and simple interface from which to access a plethora of radio astronomy software packages. This has allowed users to focus on optimising their pipelines instead of fine-tuning computing environments. Examples of stimela deployment “in the field” include the CARACal and VerMeerKAT pipelines, which are two of the pipelines capable of producing quality end-to-end MeerKAT reductions.

Three years later, stimela is ready for a second major release (stimela2) which provides a YaML-based syntax for composable processing recipes, much greater flexibility in software installations (supporting a mix of direct binary installations, virtual environments, and containers), as well as distributed pipelines that can be seamlessly deployed on most cluster infrastructures.