Selected Publications
Cameron Patterson, Brian Martin, Steve Ellingson, John Simonetti and Sean Cutchin, "FPGA Cluster Computing in the ETA Radio Telescope", Proceedings of the 2007 International Conference on Field Programmable Technology, ICFPT 2007, Kokurakita, Kitakyushu, Japan, Dec 2007.
Abstract:
Array-based, direct-sampling radio telescopes have computational and communication requirements unsuited to conventional computer and cluster architectures. Synchronization must be strictly maintained across a large number of parallel data streams, from A/D conversion, through operations such as beamforming, to dataset recording. FPGAs supporting multi-gigabit serial I/O are ideally suited to this application. We describe a recently constructed radio telescope called ETA having all-sky observing capability for detecting low frequency pulses from transient events such as gamma ray bursts and exploding primordial black holes. Signals from 24 dipole antennas are processed by a tiered arrangement of 28 commercial FPGA boards and 4 PCs with FPGA-based data acquisition cards, connected with custom I/O adapter boards supporting InfiniBand and LVDS physical links. ETA is designed for unattended operation, allowing configuration and recording to be controlled remotely.
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