ASCR/HEP Exascale Requirements Review Report

This draft report summarizes and details the findings, results, and recommendations derived from the ASCR/HEP Exascale Requirements Review meeting held in June, 2015. The main conclusions are as follows. 1) Larger, more capable computing and data facilities are needed to support HEP science goals in all three frontiers: Energy, Intensity, and Cosmic. The expected scale of the demand at the 2025 timescale is at least two orders of magnitude -- and in some cases greater -- than that available currently. 2) The growth rate of data produced by simulations is overwhelming the current ability, of both facilities and researchers, to store and analyze it. Additional resources and new techniques for data analysis are urgently needed. 3) Data rates and volumes from HEP experimental facilities are also straining the ability to store and analyze large and complex data volumes. Appropriately configured leadership-class facilities can play a transformational role in enabling scientific discovery from these datasets. 4) A close integration of HPC simulation and data analysis will aid greatly in interpreting results from HEP experiments. Such an integration will minimize data movement and facilitate interdependent workflows. 5) Long-range planning between HEP and ASCR will be required to meet HEP's research needs. To best use ASCR HPC resources the experimental HEP program needs a) an established long-term plan for access to ASCR computational and data resources, b) an ability to map workflows onto HPC resources, c) the ability for ASCR facilities to accommodate workflows run by collaborations that can have thousands of individual members, d) to transition codes to the next-generation HPC platforms that will be available at ASCR facilities, e) to build up and train a workforce capable of developing and using simulations and analysis to support HEP scientific research on next-generation systems.Comment: 77 pages, 13 Figures; draft report, subject to further revisio

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

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)

Portuguese SKA white book

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LSST: from Science Drivers to Reference Design and Anticipated Data Products

(Abridged) We describe here the most ambitious survey currently planned in the optical, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). A vast array of science will be enabled by a single wide-deep-fast sky survey, and LSST will have unique survey capability in the faint time domain. The LSST design is driven by four main science themes: probing dark energy and dark matter, taking an inventory of the Solar System, exploring the transient optical sky, and mapping the Milky Way. LSST will be a wide-field ground-based system sited at Cerro Pach\'{o}n in northern Chile. The telescope will have an 8.4 m (6.5 m effective) primary mirror, a 9.6 deg$^2$ field of view, and a 3.2 Gigapixel camera. The standard observing sequence will consist of pairs of 15-second exposures in a given field, with two such visits in each pointing in a given night. With these repeats, the LSST system is capable of imaging about 10,000 square degrees of sky in a single filter in three nights. The typical 5$\sigma$ point-source depth in a single visit in $r$ will be $\sim 24.5$ (AB). The project is in the construction phase and will begin regular survey operations by 2022. The survey area will be contained within 30,000 deg$^2$ with $\delta<+34.5^\circ$, and will be imaged multiple times in six bands, $ugrizy$, covering the wavelength range 320--1050 nm. About 90\% of the observing time will be devoted to a deep-wide-fast survey mode which will uniformly observe a 18,000 deg$^2$ region about 800 times (summed over all six bands) during the anticipated 10 years of operations, and yield a coadded map to $r\sim27.5$. The remaining 10\% of the observing time will be allocated to projects such as a Very Deep and Fast time domain survey. The goal is to make LSST data products, including a relational database of about 32 trillion observations of 40 billion objects, available to the public and scientists around the world.Comment: 57 pages, 32 color figures, version with high-resolution figures available from https://www.lsst.org/overvie

Inflation and Early Dark Energy with a Stage II Hydrogen Intensity Mapping experiment

collaboration: Cosmic Visions 21 cm archiveprefix: arXiv primaryclass: astro-ph.CO reportnumber: FERMILAB-PUB-18-594-A slaccitation: %%CITATION = ARXIV:1810.09572;%%collaboration: Cosmic Visions 21 cm archiveprefix: arXiv primaryclass: astro-ph.CO reportnumber: FERMILAB-PUB-18-594-A slaccitation: %%CITATION = ARXIV:1810.09572;%

Interferometric Methods

Future radio telescopes promise great advances in resolution and sensitivity. These include the Square Kilometer Array, a two array instrument, in South Africa and Australia. Similarly, the next generation Very Large Array (ngVLA) is being designed for construction in North America. These arrays all promise exceptional advances in sensitivity, angular resolution, and survey speed. The SKA and ngVLA are both specified to have sensitivities at the level of $\mu$Jy's. The SKA-Low instrument will consist of a huge number of dipoles antennas in Australia which is pushing the bounds of current FX correlator technology with $\mathbb{O}(n^2)$ scaling, where $n$ is the number of antennas. The design proposals for these instruments include a dense core of antennas, necessitating advances in imaging methods for these very dense cores versus more traditionally sparse instruments. Another ambitious experiment is the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionisation Array (HERA) in South Africa which hopes to make the first direct detection of the Epoch of Reionisation through the red-shifted H{\sc i} signal which is a factor of $10^{5}$ smaller than the thermal-like noise. In this thesis, these problems are tackled by re-examining the underlying principles of interferometry. The first working example of a direct imaging correlator is presented which allows images to be formed directly from the voltages off each antenna in a dense array, without an expensive cross-correlation operation as is typically required. A detailed discussion is given of how standard steps in interferometric imaging differ in this new scheme, including calibration. Additionally the first wide field direct imaging correlator is presented, which allows the problems of non-coplanarity to be dealt with for both sparse and dense arrays in a very efficient manner on modern GPU compute hardware. These are, to the best of the authors knowledge, the only working implementations of a direct imaging correlator for generic arrays with no restrictions on the geometry of the array or homogeneity of constituent receiver elements. These new approaches have been published in the scientific literature as discussed in the Declaration. Moving on from this, the closure phase bispectrum is presented as a way of uncovering the cosmological Epoch of Reionisation signal from the H{\sc i} line. This is using the HERA telescope, which consists of a dense core of parabolic antennas in a highly redundant layout. A data reduction and processing pipeline for the HERA telescope is constructed and presented, for use with the bispectrum. Initial results towards a cosmologial limit are reported. The HERA telescope relies on redundancy in its antenna elements for its calibration and measurement strategy. The bispectrum with its unique mathematical propeties, in combination with forward modelling, is shown to be a potent tool for probing departures from the assumed reudundancy. It is shown, through this method, that HERA suffers significant direction-dependent non-redundancies in the dataset used for our analysis, which are extremely difficult to calibrate out. Finally, the problem of wide-field imaging in next generation arrays is tackled through the development and implementation of a new scheme of wide field imaging. This uses a new method of parallelising the problem of wide-field imaging, and is intended for use with the very large datasets that will be produced by upcoming instruments. Two schemes are introduced: $w$-towers, and Improved $w$-towers. The latter generalises the former in combination with advances in optimal convolution theory for the radio astronomy ``gridding'' problem. The theory behind this approach is explored, and a high performance implementation is presented for $w$-towers and Improved $w$-stacking within Improved $w$-towers.ARM Ltd iCase Sponsorshi

Pathway to the Square Kilometre Array - The German White Paper -

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is the most ambitious radio telescope ever planned. With a collecting area of about a square kilometre, the SKA will be far superior in sensitivity and observing speed to all current radio facilities. The scientific capability promised by the SKA and its technological challenges provide an ideal base for interdisciplinary research, technology transfer, and collaboration between universities, research centres and industry. The SKA in the radio regime and the European Extreme Large Telescope (E-ELT) in the optical band are on the roadmap of the European Strategy Forum for Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) and have been recognised as the essential facilities for European research in astronomy. This "White Paper" outlines the German science and R&D interests in the SKA project and will provide the basis for future funding applications to secure German involvement in the Square Kilometre Array.Comment: Editors: H. R. Kl\"ockner, M. Kramer, H. Falcke, D.J. Schwarz, A. Eckart, G. Kauffmann, A. Zensus; 150 pages (low resolution- and colour-scale images), published in July 2012, language English (including a foreword and an executive summary in German), the original file is available via the MPIfR homepag