Radioastronomy Image Synthesis on the Cell/B.E.

Abstract. Now that large radiotelescopes like SKA, LOFAR, or ASKAP, become available in different parts of the world, radioastronomers foresee a vast increase in the amount of data to gather, store and process. To keep the processing time bounded, parallelization and execution on (massively) parallel machines are required for the commonly-used radioastronomy software kernels. In this paper, we analyze data gridding and degridding, a very time-consuming kernel of radioastronomy image synthesis. To tackle its its dynamic behavior, we devise and implement a parallelization strategy for the Cell/B.E. multi-core processor, offering a cost-efficient alternative compared to classical supercomputers. Our experiments show that the application running on one Cell/B.E. is more than 20 times faster than the original application running on a commodity machine. Based on scalability experiments, we estimate the hardware requirements for a realistic radio-telescope. We conclude that our parallelizatio...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: EUROPAR
• Authors: Ana Lucia Varbanescu, Alexander S. van Amesfoort, Tim Cornwell, Andrew Mattingly, Bruce G. Elmegreen, Rob van Nieuwpoort, Ger van Diepen, Henk J. Sips
• Keywords: Commonly-used Radioastronomy Software, Distributed And Parallel Computing, EUROPAR 2008, Multi-core Processors, Parallelization