ProFound

CI: – Dr. Aaron Robotham

ProFound is a new source extraction code that is being used to process major Australian led optical/NIR surveys, and is already a key code for upcoming radio continuum data processing (ASKAP EMU and ATCA GLASS). It has also been used for processing JVLA data, and was recently entered into the first SKA data challenge for continuum source extraction, where it secured 1st and 2nd in the competition against a dozen international teams. Whilst the methodology behind ProFound is well justified and tested, we recognise that it is non-optimal in terms of memory consumption and efficiency in a few key bottlenecks. Since it is written in R, many of these artificial limits can be avoided by rewriting key architecture in C/C++ and then calling into R dynamically. This proposal seeks assistance in identifying and recoding into C/C++ the most significant bottlenecks that affect the code scaling.