From March 10 through 14, an international meeting on the development of the data analysis pipeline for the ALMA Telescope was held at the ALMA Building in NAOJ Mitaka campus. Astronomers and software engineers gathered from Japan, Europe, and North America, and discussed the current development status and development schedule of the pipeline.

ALMA Observation data is delivered to researchers by following a set of procedures. First, the observation data is analyzed by the staff of the Joint ALMA Observatory (JAO) and the ALMA Regional Centers in East Asia, Europe, and North America to check the data quality so as to meet the specifications required by researchers. And then, only after passing the quality assurance test, the data is open to researchers. This is a policy to prevent any trouble in a subsequent research process. As the volume of the ALMA observation data is rapidly increasing, the project members are currently developing an automated analysis pipeline software tool for faster data processing.

This meeting was a gathering of key persons who lead the development and testing of pipeline processing. The current status and the future perspectives were shared and confirmed by the participants. The development of the pipeline is well under way. If all goes smoothly, automated processing with this system will be partially made available by the middle of this year.