A GPU Spatial Processing System for CHIME

Abstract

We present an overview of the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) based spatial processing system created for the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME). The design employs AMD S9300x2 GPUs and readily-available commercial hardware in its processing nodes to provide a cost- and power-efficient processing substrate. These nodes are supported by a liquid-cooling system which allows continuous operation with modest power consumption and in all but the most adverse conditions. Capable of continuously correlating 2048 receiver-polarizations across 400\,MHz of bandwidth, the CHIME X-engine constitutes the most powerful radio correlator currently in existence. It receives $6.6$\,Tb/s of channelized data from CHIME's FPGA-based F-engine, and the primary correlation task requires $8.39\times 10^{14}$ complex multiply-and-accumulate operations per second. The same system also provides formed-beam data products to commensal FRB and Pulsar experiments; it constitutes a general spatial-processing system of unprecedented scale and capability, with correspondingly great challenges in computation, data transport, heat dissipation, and interference shielding.

References in corpus (16)

• Observational Probes of Cosmic Acceleration
• 21-cm cosmology
• Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA)
• Periodic activity from a fast radio burst source
• The CHIME Fast Radio Burst Project: System Overview
• A Second Source of Repeating Fast Radio Bursts
• PAPER-64 Constraints on Reionization: The 21cm Power Spectrum at z=8.4
• Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) Pathfinder
• Observations of Fast Radio Bursts at Frequencies down to 400 Megahertz
• Possibility of Precise Measurement of the Cosmological Power Spectrum With a Dedicated 21cm Survey After Reionization
• The Fast Fourier Transform Telescope
• The Expanded Very Large Array
• Omniscopes: Large Area Telescope Arrays with only N log N Computational Cost
• The Murchison Widefield Array Correlator
• The cloverleaf antenna: A compact wide-bandwidth dual-polarization feed for CHIME
• Accelerating Radio Astronomy Cross-Correlation with Graphics Processing Units

Cited by in corpus (5)

• The CHIME Pulsar Project: System Overview
• No Evidence for Galactic Latitude Dependence of the Fast Radio Burst Sky Distribution
• A fast radio burst localized at detection to an edge-on galaxy using very-long-baseline interferometry
• A clock stabilization system for CHIME/FRB Outriggers
• An Overview of CHIME, the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment