README for CMBICA

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Introduction

CMBICA is a Python program to run the FastICA algorithm over maps of the microwave sky, with the intent to separate the signal of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) from other foreground signals (like e.g. synchrotron). It is a complete rewrite of a Fortran90 program written by Carlo Burigana, Andrea Farusi and Davide Maino. This rewrite exploits a number of "new" programming concept, like the usage of literate programming approach (using Noweb) and the extensive use of test cases to validate the code.

Supported platforms

CMBICA has been developed on Mac OS X 10.5 and 10.6, but it can be run also on Linux (and probably any other Unix machine). I am happy to implement patches that allow the library to be used on other systems as well.

Installation

Before compiling and installing the software, you have to install the following components:

• Python (at least version 2.5) — if you are using a Unix system or Mac OS X, there are good chances that you already have it;

• NumPy, a Python library;

• PyFITS, a Python library to load FITS files;

• HealPy, a Python port of the famous Healpix library.

• To create the documentation, you need to have LaTeX and the texi2pdf script installed.

Python libraries can easily be installed using the easy_install script or other platform-specific tools like port under Mac or apt-get under Ubuntu Linux. Remember however that some of them might not have been ported to your platform yet (this is most likely for HealPy).

To create both the Python executable and the documentation (in PDF) format, just run make (or gmake).

Usage

To use the program, you have to write a parameter file, that is a text file containing the information needed by the program to do its job. This includes the path to all the FITS files (in the Healpix format) containing the sky maps, the output files to write and optionally the mask to use in the process.