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AIPS++ Consortium

The following organizations are participating in building AIPS++:

• the Australia Telescope National Facility (ATNF) in Sydney, Australia. The ATNF is a division of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO);
• the Jodrell Bank Observatory (JBO) and the MERLIN/VLBI National Facility (MERLIN/VLBI), United Kingdom
• the Berkeley-Illinois-Maryland Association (BIMA), U.S.A.;
• the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), U.S.A. The NRAO is a facility of the National Science Foundation (NSF) operated under a cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI)
• the Netherlands Foundation for Research in Astronomy (NFRA) in Dwingeloo, the Netherlands;

AIPS++ Consortium Ends

The members of the AIPS++ Consortium, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, ASTRON, the Australia Telescope National Facility, the Jodrell Bank Observatory, and the Berkeley-Illinois-Maryland Array, announce the end of the consortium, effective immediately. The end of the consortium means the withdrawal of the resources currently committed, the end of joint management meetings, and the end of the consortium executive. The AIPS++ code base generated by the consortium remains available to all. The code base is covered by the GNU Public License, held by Associated Universities.

At this juncture, we would like to summarize the accomplishments of the consortium. Although our shared goal of developing the next generation radio astronomical data reduction software package has not been fully realized, the package does have the basic core capabilities for radio astronomy and has been used in various targeted applications. However, the Executive Committee has concluded that the consortium structure is no longer appropriate as we turn from building the core of the package to developing scientific applications targeted to our specific telescopes. Consequently, future collaboration between our observatories will be in the form of new bilateral or multilateral agreements and will focus on specific scientific needs.

The AIPS++ Executive Committee wishes to recognize all those who have contributed to the project over its entire lifetime. We thank all of the many very talented and dedicated people have been involved in the project in many different ways. We assure these people in particular that the core capabilities of AIPS++ will not be lost - as described above, we expect that future developments by our individual observatories will make appropriate use of the extensive functionalities in the AIPS++ package.

The AIPS++ Executive Committee: Harvey Butcher, Tim Cornwell, Dick Crutcher, Phil Diamond, Ron Ekers, and Fred Lo (Chair)

April 21, 2003

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