Release Notes

Details regarding the JIRA tickets that contributed to each PST release are found in the PST Changelog. Important migration information regarding recent PST releases that may is provided below.

2.1.0 to 2.2.0

This minor release delivers the first release of the Detected Filterbank processing mode for PST. This first release includes some limits on the functionality of the Detected Filterbank configurations options:

  • Re-channelisation: only re-channelisation to wider channels is supported. The output_frequency_channels must be less than or equal to the number of input channels.

  • RFI mitigation: no support for RFI mitigation via Spectral Kurtosis or using robust statistics during requantisation.

  • Dedispersion: limits on the maximum supported Dispersion Measure exist, due to memory limits relating to Centre Frequency and Dispersion Measure.

Other interface related changes introduced in this release include:

2.0.1 to 2.1.0

This minor release includes support for ADR-111 (ECP-250142) where PST:

  • Reports on input data quality metrics whilst in the Ready and Scanning states; and

  • Accepts the optional start_time parameter to the Scan command that defines the time at which PST will commence. Although PST supports scan start_time, this new feature has not yet been released in CSP LMC or TMC.

Other bug fixes and changes introduced in this release include:

  • Flow Through mode:

    • PST now correctly applies the CBF/PSR packet de-normalisation factors when unpacking data on the GPU.

    • PST no longer corrupts some samples when selecting a sub-set of channels, this did not affect full-band processing.

  • Voltage Recorder mode: PST no longer uses O_DIRECT when writing weights files, this option only applies to data files.

  • PST now can reliably abort via EndScan and Reset when DSP processing fails.

  • TANGO attribute warning thresholds (of 0) for variance related metrics have been removed, meaning the metrics matching [real|image]Pol[A|B]VarianceFreqAvg[RfiExcised] will no longer generate an alarm if the variance is zero.

  • PST helm chart secrets can be specified for each beam/container via env vars.

2.0.0 to 2.0.1

This patch release includes fixes for:

  • Upgrading ska-pst chart via helmfile

  • Flow Through mode processing when executing on a GPU with a large number of channels configured

  • Add missing, useful parameters to Ascii Header meta-data needed for subsequent processing of PST data products for Voltage Recorder (PFB_NCHAN, PFB_DC_CHAN and DSB) and Flow Through (INSTRUMENT=dspsr) processing modes

1.4.1 to 2.0.0

This major release of PST includes support for a new interface between PST and the SDP that provides a PST Signal Display. This new interface publishes PST input monitoring statistics, stored in MsgPack structured messages, to topics configured in a facility Kafka service. The SDP QA Displays have a PST Signal Display tab that displays this information.

This release of PST also includes an amalgamation of the container’s that ran each of the DSP processing modes (Voltage Recorder and Flow Through). Previously, each processing mode was deployed as a separate application and container within the ska-pst deployment. This release combines these into a single application and container that is capable of running any of the (mutually exclusive) DSP processing modes. This has altered the structure of the ska-pst helm chart, so any values.yaml over-rides for this part of the ska-pst chart will require adjustments.

This release includes substantial work in development of a the Detected Filterbank PST processing mode, however this functionality is not yet released or supported.

  • Bugs that have been addressed in this release include

    • Fixed (SKB-1176) verify that receptor and receptor weights arrays have equal length

    • Fixed (SKB-1156) update the interpretation of the validity flags in CBF/PSR packet headers

1.4.0 to 1.4.1

This patch release includes a bug fix identified in AT3-1147 where the cpp DSP StreamWriter subordinate process does not disconnect during a reset executed after an abort.

1.3.2 to 1.4.0

This minor release includes some important changes with to the PST TANGO attributes

  • Existing attributes were renamed to reduce confusion about their purpose and value

    • noValidPolarisationCorrectionPackets -> invalidPolarisationCorrectionPackets

    • noValidPolarisationCorrectionPacketRate -> invalidPolarisationCorrectionPacketRate

    • noValidStationBeamPackets -> invalidStationBeamPackets

    • noValidStationBeamPacketRate -> invalidStationBeamPacketRate

    • noValidPstBeamPackets -> invalidPstBeamPackets

    • noValidPstBeamPacketRate -> invalidPstBeamPacketRate

  • New attributes were added that provide Quality Assurance metrics. These are introduced for ADR-111 and report the percentage of PST input data that are considered valid with respect to various measures

    • percentageDataReceived : percentage of CBF data that is currently being received

    • percentageValidStationBeam : percentage of CBF data that currently has valid station beam delay polynomials applied

    • percentageValidPstBeam : percentage of CBF data that currently has valid pst beam delay polynomials applied

    • percentageValidPolarisationCorrection: percentage of CBF data that currently has valid jones matrices applied

  • PST base OCI images were updated from Ubuntu 22.04 to Ubuntu 24.04

  • A number of bugs and other issues were fixed in this release

    • Fixed (SKB-1119) relating to PST CORE apps failing during ABORT command

    • Fixed (SKB-1137) introduced in 1.3.2 relating to TANGO attributes for the DSP component

    • Fixed (SKB-1155) Kubernetes label mismatch when tango operator is enabled and PST is in simulation mode

    • Fixed poetry dependencies to allow PST Python library to be used in testing/verification scripts

    • Logging messages of PST-LMC state transition changes were improved with some false positive health state messages suppressed

    • Python version unpinned from 3.10, now at least 3.10 but less than 4.0 (i.e. =3.10.0,<4.0)

1.3.1 to 1.3.2

This patch release includes the following notable changes

  • Improved handling of Abort and ObsReset commands, related to SKB-1109, SKB-1110, and SKB-1119

  • Calculate and report the rates of misordered, misdirected, and malformed packets received from the CBF.

  • Removed validation about available recording time when PST is deployed to not generate output files

  • Updated PST STAT data access library to handle output statistics files of Flow Through Mode when NPOL=1

  • Fixed incorrect alignment of data and weights segments when processing input statistics

  • Fixed the PST LMC long running command results to include a ResultCode and message tuple

1.3.0 to 1.3.1

This is a patch release that fixes compatibility issues between the ska-pst chart and the ska-tango-operator chart (SKB-2347).

1.2.2 to 1.3.0

This minor release introduces new, optional, capabilities to PST:

  • Support for deployment of multiple PST beams into the same Kubernetes namespace, which is required for AA1 and beyond. Refer to Deploy ska-pst with multiple beams in non simulation mode for more information.

  • Support command line overrides to disable the creation of output files, useful in CBF/PST integration environments where the file system provided to PST is too slow to support realtime operations.

  • Introduction of a PST self-test init container that executes configuration, hardware and performance tests on the server onto which PST is deployed. This is disabled by default, refer to Enable ska-pst selftest to check k8s node configuration compatibility for more information.

This release also includes a fix relating to SKB-1045 for packets that were reported as not received (in TANGO attributes) or invalid (in HDF5 statistics files). This was achieved by:

  • Introducing an offset of two Packet Sequence Numbers when a Scan is started.

  • Prevent partially received SMRB blocks from being written to disk when a Scan is stopped.

The Docker images used in ska-pst core deployments (ska-pst-recv, ska-pst-stat, ska-pst-smrb and ska-pst-dsp) have been rationalised into a single ska-pst-core image.

1.2.1 to 1.2.2

This is a patch release that fixes memory leaks in SKA-PST code relating to multiple scans performed in Flow Through Mode (SKB-1017)

1.2.0 to 1.2.1

This is a patch release that fixes some issues found during testing of 1.2.0

  • Fixing of CUDA memory leak issues of the DSPSR code (SKB-1017)

  • Removing dependencies of bitnami in the Helm charts and updating to the latest SKA base Helm charts

  • SEND had multiple small issues that have been resolved

    • If there is issue in generating output statistic files the scan will still be sent to DLM, previously this would cause an issue

    • Fix of a regression introduced in 1.2.0 where the scan length in the output metadata was not being calculated

    • Any scan that fails during processing in SEND will now be moved to the staging/invalid/<flatten_path> directory, where <flatten_path> is <eb_id>_<subsystem>_<scan_id>. This stops SEND from trying to reprocess the scan but no data is lost. When a scan is marked as invalid a warning message will be outputted to the SEND logs.

1.1.2 to 1.2.0

  • Input and Output HDF5 statistics files are now produced by PST for Voltage Recorder and Flow Through processing modes, and made available to the DLM Client for archival in directories

    • input-stats: statistics of the tied-array beam data received from the CBF, generated from short snapshots of data extracted from the Shared Memory Ring Buffer (SMRB)

    • output-stats: statistics of the PST output data streams, generated from the first 100 milliseconds of data in each Voltage Recorder or Flow Through data/weights file pair.

  • Data products produced by the Flow Through processing mode are now prepared for ingest by the DLM Client

  • Container resources in the ska-pst helm chart may now be over-ridden with per container granularity.

  • The container memory requests in the ska-pst helm chart defaults have been increased substantially from 10Gi to 32Gi to accommodate Flow Through mode.

1.1.1 to 1.1.2

  • New attributes added to the PST Beam TANGO device that provide monitoring of the signal processing pipeline performance for Flow Through mode.

  • Migrated PST base OCI images to the SKAO provided builder and runtime versions.

1.0.2 to 1.1.0

  • Migrated to ska-telmodel:1.21.0 and added support for v3.0 of the PST Scan Configuration schema.

  • PST now support using SKA sky_direction for source and coordinates (as per ADR-63).

  • PST no longer transfers output data to the shared SDP CEPH mount.

  • PST now relies on the DLM Client to transfer Voltage Recorder data products to DLM Storage, this integration with DLM has not been verified in this release.

  • PST no longer integrates with the SDP Data Product Dashboard.