Enabling a High Throughput Real Time Data Pipeline for a Large Radio Telescope Array with GPUs

Abstract

The Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) is a next-generation radio telescope currently under construction in the remote Western Australia Outback. Raw data will be generated continuously at 5GiB/s, grouped into 8s cadences. This high throughput motivates the development of on-site, real time processing and reduction in preference to archiving, transport and off-line processing. Each batch of 8s data must be completely reduced before the next batch arrives. Maintaining real time operation will require a sustained performance of around 2.5TFLOP/s (including convolutions, FFTs, interpolations and matrix multiplications). We describe a scalable heterogeneous computing pipeline implementation, exploiting both the high computing density and FLOP-per-Watt ratio of modern GPUs. The architecture is highly parallel within and across nodes, with all major processing elements performed by GPUs. Necessary scatter-gather operations along the pipeline are loosely synchronized between the nodes hosting the GPUs. The MWA will be a frontier scientific instrument and a pathfinder for planned peta- and exascale facilities.

Version accepted by Comp. Phys. Comm

References in corpus (3)

• Cosmology at Low Frequencies: The 21 cm Transition and the High-Redshift Universe
• The Murchison Widefield Array: Design Overview
• Real-Time Calibration of the Murchison Widefield Array

Cited by in corpus (5)

• The Murchison Widefield Array: the Square Kilometre Array Precursor at low radio frequencies
• Accelerating Radio Astronomy Cross-Correlation with Graphics Processing Units
• High-Performance Image Synthesis for Radio Interferometry
• BLINK: an End-To-End GPU High Time Resolution Imaging Pipeline for Fast Radio Burst Searches with the Murchison Widefield Array
• High-Performance Gridding For Radio Interferometric Image Synthesis