Astronomical real-time streaming signal processing on a Blue Gene/L supercomputer

LOFAR is the first of a new generation of radio telescopes, that combines the signals from many thousands of simple, fixed antennas, rather than from expensive dishes. Its revolutionary design and unprecedented size enables observations in a frequency range that could hardly be observed before, and allows the study of a vast amount of new science cases. In this paper, we describe a novel approach to process realtime, streaming telescope data in software, using a supercomputer. The desire for a flexible and reconfigurable instrument demands a software solution, where traditionally customized hardware was used. This, and LOFAR’s exceptional real-time, streaming signalprocessing requirements compel the use of a supercomputer. We focus on the LOFAR CEntral Processing facility (CEP), that combines the signals of all LOFAR stations. CEP consists of a 12,288core IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer, embedded in several conventional clusters. We describe a highly optimized implementation that ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: SPAA
• Authors: John W. Romein, P. Chris Broekema, Ellen van Meijeren, Kjeld van der Schaaf, Walther H. Zwart
• Keywords: Blue Gene/L, Blue Gene/L Supercomputer, Distributed And Parallel Computing, Signal Processing, SPAA 2006