42 research outputs found

    System design for the square kilometre array : new views of the universe

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    The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope is being designed as a premier scientific instrument of the 21st century, using novel technologies to maximise its scientific capability. The SKA has an aggressive project timeline, dynamic and evolving scientific requirements, and a large design exploration space with many interdependent sub-systems. These complexities increase the difficulty in developing cost-effective design solutions that maximise the scientific capability of the telescope within construction and operations funding constraints.To gain insight into specific design challenges in this thesis, I have developed parametric models of the telescope system that relate cost to key performance metrics. I examine, as case studies, three aspects of the SKA design that have had little investigation compared to the rest of the telescope to date, but show considerable potential for discovering new astronomical phenomena.First, I present fast transient survey strategies for exploring high time resolution parameter space, and consider the system design implications of these strategies. To maximise the scientific return from limited processing capacity, I develop a new metric, ‘event rate per beam’, to measure the cost-effectiveness of the various search strategies. The most appropriate search strategy depends on the observed sky direction and the source population; for SKA Phase 1, low-frequency aperture arrays tend to be more effective for extragalactic searches, and dishes more effective for directions of increased scatter broadening, such as near the Galactic plane.Second, I compare the cost of two design solutions for low-frequency sparse aperture array observations (70–450 MHz) that achieve similar performance: a single-band implementation with a wideband antenna design; and a dual-band implementation, with each array observing approximately half the fractional bandwidth. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, despite the dual-band array having twice the number of antenna elements, neither a representative single or dual-band implementation is cheaper a priori, although the uncertainties are currently high. In terms of the broader telescope system design, I show that the central processing, antenna deployment and site preparation costs are potentially significant cost drivers that have so far had insufficient attention.Third, the recent site decision gives rise to the question of how to cost-effectively provide data connectivity to widely separated antennas, to enable high angular resolution observations with the SKA dish array in Africa. To facilitate the design of such a data network, I parametrise the performance and cost of an exemplar network using three simple metrics: maximum baseline length; number of remote stations (grouped antennas) on long baselines; and the product of bandwidth and number of station beams. While all three metrics are cost drivers, limiting the beam–bandwidth product reduces cost without significantly impacting scientific performance.The complexities of the SKA design environment prevent straightforward analyses of cost-effective design solutions. However, the case studies in this thesis demonstrate the importance of parametric performance and cost modelling of the telescope system in determining cost-effective design solutions that are capable of revealing large regions of unexplored parameter space in the radio Universe. The analytical approach to requirements analysis and performance-cost modelling, combined with pragmatic choices to narrow the exploration space, yields new insights into cost-effective SKA designs. Continuation of this approach will be essential to successfully integrate the forthcoming results from various verifications systems into the SKA design over the next few years

    High-Performance Computing for SKA Transient Search: Use of FPGA based Accelerators -- a brief review

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    This paper presents the High-Performance computing efforts with FPGA for the accelerated pulsar/transient search for the SKA. Case studies are presented from within SKA and pathfinder telescopes highlighting future opportunities. It reviews the scenario that has shifted from offline processing of the radio telescope data to digitizing several hundreds/thousands of antenna outputs over huge bandwidths, forming several 100s of beams, and processing the data in the SKA real-time pulsar search pipelines. A brief account of the different architectures of the accelerators, primarily the new generation Field Programmable Gate Array-based accelerators, showing their critical roles to achieve high-performance computing and in handling the enormous data volume problems of the SKA is presented here. It also presents the power-performance efficiency of this emerging technology and presents potential future scenarios.Comment: Accepted for JoAA, SKA Special issue on SKA (2022

    Radio-Astronomical Imaging on Accelerators

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    Imaging is considered the most compute-intensive and therefore most challenging part of a radio-astronomical data-processing pipeline. To reach the high dynamic ranges imposed by the high sensitivity and large field of view of the new generation of radio telescopes such as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), we need to be able to correct for direction-independent effects (DIEs) such as the curvature of the earth as well as for direction-dependent time-varying effects (DDEs) such as those caused by the ionosphere during imaging. The novel Image-Domain gridding (IDG) algorithm was designed to avoid the performance bottlenecks of traditional imaging algorithms. We implement, optimize, and analyze the performance and energy efficiency of IDG on a variety of hardware platforms to find which platform is the best for IDG. We analyze traditional CPUs, as well as several accelerators architectures. IDG alleviates the limitations of traditional imaging algorithms while it enables the advantages of GPU acceleration: better performance at lower power consumption. The hardware-software co-design has resulted in a highly efficient imager. This makes IDG on GPUs an ideal candidate for meeting the computational and energy efficiency constraints of the SKA. IDG has been integrated with a widely-used astronomical imager (WSClean) and is now being used in production by a variety of different radio observatories such as LOFAR and the MWA. It is not only faster and more energy-efficient than its competitors, but it also produces better quality images

    Design of a novel X-section architecture for FX-correlator in large interferometers : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Engineering at Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand

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    Figures 2-12 and 2-17 are re-used under CC BY-NC 4.0 International & CC 3.0 Unported Licences respectively.Published journal papers I-III in the Appendices were removed because they are subject to copyright restrictions.In large radio-interferometers it is considerably challenging to perform signal correlations at input data-rates of over 11 Tbps, which involves vast amount of storage, memory bandwidth and computational hardware. The primary objective of this research work is to focus on reducing the memory-access and design complexity in matrix architectural Big Data processing of the complex X-section of an FX-correlator employed in large array radio-telescopes. This thesis presents a dedicated correlator-system-multiplier-and -accumulator (CoSMAC) cell architecture based on the real input samples from antenna arrays which produces two 16-bit complex multiplications in the same clock cycle. The novel correlator cell optimization is achieved by utilizing the flipped mirror relationship between Discrete Fourier transform (DFT) samples owing to the symmetry and periodicity of the DFT coefficient vectors. The proposed CoSMAC structure is extended to build a new processing element (PE) which calculates both cross- correlation visibilities and auto-correlation functions simultaneously. Further, a novel mathematical model and a hardware design is derived to calculate two visibilities per baseline for the Quadrature signals (IQ sampled signals, where I is In-phase signal and Q is the 90 degrees phase shifted signal) named as Processing Element for IQ sampled signals (PE_IQ). These three proposed dedicated correlator cells minimise the number of visibility calculations in a baseline. The design methodology also targets the optimisation of the multiplier size in order to reduce the power and area further in the CoSMAC, PE and PE_IQ. Various fast and efficient multiplier algorithms are compared and combined to achieve a novel multiplier named Modified-Booth-Wallace-Multiplier and implemented in the CoSMAC and PE cells. The dedicated multiplier is designed to mostly target the area and power optimisations without degrading the performance. The conventional complex-multiplier-and-accumulators (CMACs) employed to perform the complex multiplications are replaced with these dedicated ASIC correlator cells along with the optimized multipliers to reduce the overall power and area requirements in a matrix correlator architecture. The proposed architecture lowers the number of ASIC processor cells required to calculate the overall baselines in an interferometer by eliminating the redundant cells. Hence the new matrix architectural minimization is very effective in reducing the hardware complexity by nearly 50% without affecting the overall speed and performance of very large interferometers like the Square Kilometre Array (SKA)

    Cross-Correlator Implementations Enabling Aperture Synthesis for Geostationary-Based Remote Sensing

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    An ever-increasing demand for weather prediction and high climate modelling accuracy drives the need for better atmospheric data collection. These demands include better spatial and temporal coverage of mainly humidity and temperature distributions in the atmosphere. A new type of remote sensing satellite technology is emerging, originating in the field of radio astronomy where telescope aperture upscaling could not keep up with the increasing demand for higher resolution. Aperture synthesis imaging takes an array of receivers and emulates apertures extending way beyond what is possible with any single antenna. In the field of Earth remote sensing, the same idea could be used to construct satellites observing in the microwave region at a high resolution with foldable antenna arrays. If placed in a geostationary orbit, these could produce images with high temporal resolution, however, such altitudes make the resolution requirement and, hence, signal processing very demanding. The relentless development in miniaturization of integrated circuits has in recent years made the concept of high resolution aperture synthesis imaging aboard a satellite platform viable.The work presented in this thesis addresses the challenge of performing the vital signal processing required aboard an aperture synthesis imager; namely the cross-correlation. A number of factors make the application challenging; the very restrictive power budgets of satellites, the immense amount of signal processing required for larger arrays, and the environmental aspects of in-space operation. The design, fabrication and evaluation of two cross-correlator application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), one analog-to-digital converter (ADC) ASIC and one complete cross-correlator back-end is presented. Design concepts such as clocking schemes, data routing and reconfigurable accuracy for the cross-correlators and offset compensation and interfacing of the ADCs are explained. The underlying reasons for design choices as well as ASIC design and testing methodologies are described. The ASICs are put into their proper context as part of an interferometer system, and some different cross-correlator back-end architectures are explored.The result from this work is a very power-efficient, high-performance way of constructing cross-correlators which clearly demonstrates the viability of space-borne microwave imaging interferometer back-ends
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