MWA News & Highlights

MWA Achieves First Light in the Lab

The backbone of the MWA is its high-throughput correlator and its real-time calibration and imaging system (RTS), which will run on a GPU-accelerated computing cluster.

The correlator and RTS have now been brought together for the first time, on a lab bench, and as hoped, they worked together. A prototype correlator nodule was given a test pattern of data. It performed its calculations, generating ethernet packets that were passed by conventional copper cabling to a high-performance, GPU-enabled workstation running the RTS. The workstation captured the packets with ZERO loss, exchanged data among multiple computing threads, unpacked the information, passed it through the RTS, and generated images, in real-time.

Credit goes to the correlator and RTS groups, with the final dash including Bart Kincaid, and a tag team of Steve Ord and Stewart Gleadow, working round the clock in opposite time zones (Cambridge and Melbourne). RTS hardware was provided by the sciGPU effort at Harvard's Initiative for Innvoative Computing.

The figure shows one of the images generated during the integration exercise. The heritage of the image is perhaps the most important aspect, and this one, though blank, speaks a thousand words.

Last update (22 September 2009)