The Murchison Widefield Array Correlator

Abstract

The Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) is a Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Precursor. The telescope is located at the Murchison Radio--astronomy Observatory (MRO) in Western Australia (WA). The MWA consists of 4096 dipoles arranged into 128 dual polarisation aperture arrays forming a connected element interferometer that cross-correlates signals from all 256 inputs. A hybrid approach to the correlation task is employed, with some processing stages being performed by bespoke hardware, based on Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), and others by Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) housed in general purpose rack mounted servers. The correlation capability required is approximately 8 TFLOPS (Tera FLoating point Operations Per Second). The MWA has commenced operations and the correlator is generating 8.3 TB/day of correlation products, that are subsequently transferred 700 km from the MRO to Perth (WA) in real-time for storage and offline processing. In this paper we outline the correlator design, signal path, and processing elements and present the data format for the internal and external interfaces.

17 pages, 9 figures. Accepted for publication in PASA. Some figures altered to meet astro-ph submission requirements

References in corpus (1)

• The Murchison Widefield Array Commissioning Survey: A Low-Frequency Catalogue of 14,110 Compact Radio Sources over 6,100 Square Degrees

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• Interplanetary Scintillation with the Murchison Widefield Array I: A sub-arcsecond Survey over 900 square degrees at 79 and 158 MHz
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• Probing pulsar scattering between 120 and 280 MHz with the MWA
• The Engineering Development Array: A low frequency radio telescope utilising SKA precursor technology