Related papers: Correlating Radio Astronomy Signals with Many-Core…
For low-frequency radio astronomy, software correlation and beamforming on general purpose hardware is a viable alternative to custom designed hardware. LOFAR, a new-generation radio telescope centered in the Netherlands with international…
Next generation radio telescopes will require orders of magnitude more computing power to provide a view of the universe with greater sensitivity. In the initial stages of the signal processing flow of a radio telescope, signal correlation…
A new generation of radio telescopes is achieving unprecedented levels of sensitivity and resolution, as well as increased agility and field-of-view, by employing high-performance digital signal processing hardware to phase and correlate…
Traditional radio telescopes use large, steel dishes to observe radio sources. The LOFAR radio telescope is different, and uses tens of thousands of fixed, non-movable antennas instead, a novel design that promises ground-breaking research…
The CHIME Pathfinder is a new interferometric radio telescope that uses a hybrid FPGA/GPU FX correlator. The GPU-based X-engine of this correlator processes over 819 Gb/s of 4+4-bit complex astronomical data from N=256 inputs across a 400…
Radio telescopes that employ arrays of many antennas are in operation, and ever larger ones are being designed and proposed. Signals from the antennas are combined by cross-correlation. For $N$ antennas, the cost and power consumption of…
Modern graphics processing units (GPUs) are inexpensive commodity hardware that offer Tflop/s theoretical computing capacity. GPUs are well suited to many compute-intensive tasks including digital signal processing. We describe the…
We present a highly parallel implementation of the cross-correlation of time-series data using graphics processing units (GPUs), which is scalable to hundreds of independent inputs and suitable for the processing of signals from "Large-N"…
The increased bandwidth coupled with the large numbers of antennas of several new radio telescope arrays has resulted in an exponential increase in the amount of data that needs to be recorded and processed. In many cases, it is necessary…
The digital correlator is a crucial element in a modern radio telescope. In this paper we describe a scalable design of the correlator system for the Tianlai pathfinder array, which is an experiment dedicated to test the key technologies…
A Spectral Correlator is the main component of the real time signal processing for a Radio Telescope array. The correlation of signals received at each element with every other element of the array is a classic case of an application…
Astrophysical radio signals are excellent probes of extreme physical processes that emit them. However, to reach Earth, electromagnetic radiation passes through the ionised interstellar medium (ISM), introducing a frequency-dependent time…
Upcoming large scale telescope projects such as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) will see high data rates and large data volumes; requiring tools that can analyse telescope event data quickly and accurately. In modern radio telescopes,…
We present the design and implementation of a custom GPU-based compute cluster that provides the correlation X-engine of the CHIME Pathfinder radio telescope. It is among the largest such systems in operation, correlating 32,896 baselines…
Interferometric radio telescopes often rely on computationally expensive O(N^2) correlation calculations; fortunately these computations map well to massively parallel accelerators such as low-cost GPUs. This paper describes the OpenCL…
Stochastic computing (SC) is an emerging computing technique that promises high density, low power, and error tolerant solutions. In SC, values are encoded as unary bitstreams and SC arithmetic circuits operate on one or more bitstreams. In…
We present a Python/CuPy FX software correlator for small radio interferometer arrays and evaluate it on QUEST (Qilu University Explorer Survey Telescope). The system combines multi-threaded data ingest, pinned-memory host-device transfers,…
Energy consumption and hardware cost of signal digitization together with the management of the resulting data volume form serious issues for high-rate measurement systems with multiple sensors. Switching to binary sensing front-ends…
Software correlation, where a correlation algorithm written in a high-level language such as C++ is run on commodity computer hardware, has become increasingly attractive for small to medium sized and/or bandwidth constrained radio…
In this article we discuss our implementation of a polyphase filter for real-time data processing in radio astronomy. We describe in detail our implementation of the polyphase filter algorithm and its behaviour on three generations of…