Design and Implementation of scaled down  oF Heterogeneous Spectrometers for Radio  Astronomy applications

P.Amar Singh; G.Karthik Reddy

Volume : I, Issue : VI, November - 2012

Design and Implementation of scaled down oF Heterogeneous Spectrometers for Radio Astronomy applications

P. Amar Singh, G. Karthik Reddy

Abstract :

We have developed a software package to automatically generate spectrometers with minimal user input. Spectrometer design is often done by building the instrument from scratch. We have automated this design, creating a parameterized spectrometer that only requires a recompile to implement a change in specification. This spectrometer combines FPGAs and GPUs, doing coarse channelization on the FPGA and sending each sub band to the GPUs for further processing. In this paper, we describe a radio astronomy instrument that is easily reconfigured to suit a variety of applications. This style of instrument design can be extended to a heterogeneous cluster running multiple processing algorithms at the same time. Many algorithms require the data to be oken up into sub bands before it can be processed by the server which can be done on the same FPGA.