RunningSW

The main routines are

• per_list.py
• run_persist.py
• subtract_sum.py

All are intended to be run from the command line. There are various other routines for special purposes.

(One of the more useful of these, is write_docs.py, which will create html help files in Python like format, to use it, create a directory, e.g. docs, and run

write_docs.py ../persistence

it will create various html help files for each of the Python scripts in the Persistence directory, and an html file

doc_persistence.html

with links to them all.)

per_list

The persist software expects all of the data to be in the directories that underlie the work directory. per_list (normally) creates two files observations.ls and observations.sum each of which are AstroPy tables. There is one row for each flt file in the directory tree. The rows are in time order. If a file appears more than once in the directory tree, per_list will keep the "last" version of the file

observations.ls contains information about each file, such as the time of exposure, the PI, etc. observations.sum records information about the persistence processing of that file, it is updated by run_persist

per_list is the first program run when one wants to run the persistence S/W since it effectively sets a database of the observations.

Like most of the programs, the full set of options for per_list can be discovered by typing per_list.py -h

For per_list for small sets of data, one usually does not need any of the command line options. (For numbers of datasets, 1000s or more one will want to run in parallel mode, which is done by saying

per_list.py -np 8 (or however many processors one wants to use

run_persist

This is the routine that carries out the persistence estimate. It has a lot of options, including options to use old versions of the persistence estimates (that are described in various WFC3 ISRs). The baseline option currently is one that assumes that persistence is a power law function of time, and that the amplitude of the power law and its slope depend on the fluence and the time to reach that fluence.

A few of the simpler options are as follows

• run_persist.py dataset_name -- To process a single data set
• run_persist.py -all -- To process all of the datasets contained in the observations.ls file
• run_persist.py -all -local -- To process all of the datasets, and to store the results in a directory Persist sitting under the current working directory

Note - the actual calculation of the persistence model is carried out in subtract_persist, which is called by run_persist

Without the local switch, the results of the program are placed in a directory Persist that is just underneath the location of the flt file that has been analyzed. Thus if one has flt files spread among multiple directories, the various Persist directories will be associated with the flt files. On the other hand, with the -local switch, all of the Persistence products are put into a single directory Persist under the current working directories.

subtract_sum

run_persist creates a variety of data products, which as noted above, can be spread out across a number of directories. This include html outputs for each of the datasets

Subtract_sum creates a single html file that allows easy access to the various html files. The common way to run it is

• subtract_sum.py - Create an html file of the work done in the last hour
• subtract_sum.py -all - Create an html of all of the data
• subtract_sum.py -prog_id xxxx -- Create an html file that links to all of the html files for an entire program