Abstract
The Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) is a new generation 36-antenna 36-beam interferometer capable of producing about 2.2 Gb/s of raw data. The data are streamed from the observatory directly to the dedicated small cluster at the Pawsey Supercomputing centre. The ingest pipeline is a distributed real time software which runs on this cluster and prepares the data for further (offline) processing by imaging and calibration pipelines. In addition to its main functionality, it turned out to be a valuable tool for various commissioning experiments and allowed us to run an interim system to achieve the first scientific results much earlier than otherwise possible. I will review the architecture of the ingest pipeline, its role in the overall ASKAP design as well as the lessons learned by developing a real-time application in the HPC environment.
Highlights
The Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP; e.g. [1, 2]) is one of the precursors for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA; e.g. [3]), a major international project expected to surpass existing radio-interferometers in sensitivity by more than an order of magnitude
The key new feature of ASKAP is the wide field of view which is realised with the new type of receiver and a matching set of digital equiment forming multiple beams on the sky simultaneously
Correlations between voltages received by each pair of antennas are the fundamental measurement and the image is recovered in postprocessing [5]. Due to both high image quality requirements and high data rate of the new generation interferometers, processing algorithms are an active area of research
Summary
The Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP; e.g. [1, 2]) is one of the precursors for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA; e.g. [3]), a major international project expected to surpass existing radio-interferometers in sensitivity by more than an order of magnitude. The key new feature of ASKAP is the wide field of view which is realised with the new type of receiver (called the phased array feed or PAF) and a matching set of digital equiment forming multiple beams on the sky simultaneously. This is a relatively unexplored dimension in the parameter space for observational radio astronomy enabling both faster survey speeds (many science projects require all sky surveys) and better chances to catch rare transient events [4]. The correlations are streamed via UDP (User Datagram Protocol) over the dedicated fibre-optic links to the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre in Perth, WA where they are received and decoded by the ingest pipeline in real time
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