An overview of issues and lessons learnt working with the ACES ALMA Large Program

The ALMA Cycle 8 large project ACES (ALMA Central Molecular Zone Exploration Survey) aims to map the entire Centre of the Milky Way with unprecedented spatial dynamic range in a number of lines and continuum in ALMA Band 3. The final cubes produced as part of this project will contain over 5,000 individual ALMA pointings, or around 500,000 individual beams, across more than 15,000 channels (equating to terabytes in size per cube). These data are extraordinary at present, but they may become somewhat routine after the ALMA Wideband Sensitivity Upgrade. During this talk, I will give a brief introduction to the large program and then discuss the issues we have encountered, along with lessons learnt, during the reduction and analysis of this dataset.