The Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) is a next-generation radio telescope currently under construction in the remote Western Australia Outback. Raw data will be generated continuously at 5GiB/s, grouped into 8s cadences. This high throughput motivates the development of on-site, real time processing and reduction in preference to archiving, transport and off-line processing. Each batch of 8s data must be completely reduced before the next batch arrives. Maintaining real time operation will require a sustained performance of around 2.5TFLOP/s (including convolutions, FFTs, interpolations and matrix multiplications). We describe a scalable heterogeneous computing pipeline implementation, exploiting both the high computing density and FLOP-per-Watt ratio of modern GPUs. The architecture is highly parallel within and across nodes, with all major processing elements performed by GPUs. Necessary scatter-gather operations along the pipeline are loosely synchronized between the nodes hosting the GPUs. The MWA will be a frontier scientific instrument and a pathfinder for planned peta- and exascale facilities.
@article{arxiv.1003.5575,
title = {Enabling a High Throughput Real Time Data Pipeline for a Large Radio Telescope Array with GPUs},
author = {R. G. Edgar and M. A. Clark and K. Dale and D. A. Mitchell and S. M. Ord and R. B. Wayth and H. Pfister and L. J. Greenhill},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1003.5575},
year = {2015}
}