The Murchison Widefield Array Correlator
Abstract
The Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) is a Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Precursor. The telescope is located at the Murchison Radio--astronomy Observatory (MRO) in Western Australia (WA). The MWA consists of 4096 dipoles arranged into 128 dual polarisation aperture arrays forming a connected element interferometer that cross-correlates signals from all 256 inputs. A hybrid approach to the correlation task is employed, with some processing stages being performed by bespoke hardware, based on Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), and others by Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) housed in general purpose rack mounted servers. The correlation capability required is approximately 8 TFLOPS (Tera FLoating point Operations Per Second). The MWA has commenced operations and the correlator is generating 8.3 TB/day of correlation products, that are subsequently transferred 700 km from the MRO to Perth (WA) in real-time for storage and offline processing. In this paper we outline the correlator design, signal path, and processing elements and present the data format for the internal and external interfaces.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1501.05992,
title = {The Murchison Widefield Array Correlator},
author = {S. M. Ord and B. Crosse and D. Emrich and D. Pallot and R. B. Wayth and M. A. Clark and S. E. Tremblay and W. Arcus and D. Barnes and M. Bell and G. Bernardi and N. D. R. Bhat and J. D. Bowman and F. Briggs and J. D. Bunton and R. J. Cappallo and B. E. Corey and A. A. Deshpande and L. deSouza and A. Ewell-Wice and L. Feng and R. Goeke and L. J. Greenhill and B. J. Hazelton and D. Herne and J. N. Hewitt and L. Hindson and H. Hurley-Walker and D. Jacobs and M. Johnston-Hollitt and D. L. Kaplan and J. C. Kasper and B. B. Kincaid and R. Koenig and E. Kratzenberg and N. Kudryavtseva and E. Lenc and C. J. Lonsdale and M. J. Lynch and B. McKinley and S. R. McWhirter and D. A. Mitchell and M. F. Morales and E. Morgan and D. Oberoi and A. Offringa and J. Pathikulangara and B. Pindor and T. Prabu and P. Procopio and R. A. Remillard and J. Riding and A. E. E. Rogers and A. Roshi and J. E. Salah and R. J. Sault and N. Udaya Shankar and K. S. Srivani and J. Stevens and R. Subrahmanyan and S. J. Tingay and M. Waterson and R. L. Webster and A. R. Whitney and A. Williams and C. L. Williams and J. S. B. Wyithe},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1501.05992},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
17 pages, 9 figures. Accepted for publication in PASA. Some figures altered to meet astro-ph submission requirements