Software for the Murchison Widefield Array radio telescope
summary
A working end-to-end pipeline controls the Murchison Widefield Array: 16 desert receivers digitize tiles, FPGA polyphase filterbanks make 256 coarse channels, 24 chosen coarse channels are split into 128 fine 10 kHz channels each, producing about 8 GB/s (roughly 7.8 Gbit/s per voltage capture) that are routed over custom links and UDP into GPU correlators. Python glues control (Pyro, Thrift) and orchestration while C/CUDA (NVIDIA xGPU) does the heavy correlation; results are archived to tape and power a southern-sky radio survey released 2014–2015.
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chapters (11)
- 0:00Introduction to the MWA
- 1:25Telescope infrastructure
- 3:30Antenna array design
- 5:53Beamforming and phasing
- 9:18Digitization process
- 12:04Data acquisition and FPGA
- 15:17Software control systems
- 17:28The data processing room
- 20:14Data storage and analysis
- 22:34Orchestration and results
- 26:00Q&A and concluding remarks
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