DPPP (Default Pre-Processing Pipeline, also referred to as NDPPP) reads and writes radio-interferometric data in the form of Measurement Sets, mainly those that are created by the LOFAR telescope. It goes through visibilities in time order and contains standard operations like averaging, phase-shifting and flagging bad stations. Between the steps in a pipeline, the data is not written to disk, making this tool suitable for operations where I/O dominates. More advanced procedures such as gain calibration are also included. Other computing steps can be provided by loading a shared library; currently supported external steps are the AOFlagger (ascl:1010.017) and a bridge that enables loading python steps.

Apercal is a dedicated, automated data reduction and analysis pipeline written for the Apertif (APERture Tile In Focus) upgrade to the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope. This upgrade dramatically increases the field of view and survey speed of the telescope and is being used for survey observations that can produce 5 terabytes of data for each observation. Apercal uses existing and new tools and parallelization to provide the performance needed for the large volume of data produced Apertif surveys. The software is written entirely in Python and uses third–party astronomical software, such as AOFlagger (ascl:1010.017), CASA (ascl:1107.013), and Miriad (ascl:1106.007), for certain tasks. Apercal is modular, making it possible to run specific modules manually instead of the full pipeline, and information can be exchanged between modules because status parameters are written and read from a python pickled dictionary file. The pipeline can also run fully automatically.