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The Murchison Widefield Array Correlator

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Open access via publisher
Authors
Ord, Stephen
Crosse, B.
Emrich, D.
Pallot, D.
Wayth, Randall
Clark, M.
Tremblay, S.
Arcus, W.
Barnes, D.
Bell, M.
Bernardi, G.
Bhat, N.
Bowman, J.
Briggs, F.
Bunton, J.
Cappallo, R.
Corey, B.
Deshpande, A.
deSouza, L.
Ewell-Wice, A.
Feng, L.
Goeke, R.
Greenhill, L.
Hazelton, B.
Herne, D.
Hewitt, J.
Hindson, L.
Hurley-Walker, N.
Jacobs, D.
Johnston-Hollitt, M.
Kaplan, D.
Kasper, J.
Kincaid, B.
Koenig, R.
Kratzenberg, E.
Kudryavtseva, N.
Lenc, E.
Lonsdale, C.
Lynch, Mervyn
McKinley, B.
McWhirter, S.
Mitchell, D.
Morales, M.
Morgan, E.
Oberoi, D.
Offringa, A.
Pathikulangara, J.
Pindor, B.
Prabu, T.
Procopio, P.
Remillard, R.
Riding, J.
Rogers, A.
Roshi, A.
Salah, J.
Sault, R.
Shankar, N.
Srivani, K.
Stevens, J.
Subrahmanyan, R.
Tingay, Steven
Waterson, M.
Webster, R.
Whitney, A.
Williams, A.
Williams, C.
Wyithe, J.
Date
2015
Type
Journal Article

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Citation
Ord, S. and Crosse, B. and Emrich, D. and Pallot, D. and Wayth, R. and Clark, M. and Tremblay, S. et al. 2015. The Murchison Widefield Array Correlator. Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia. 32: Article ID e006.
Source Title
PUBLICATIONS OF THE ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY OF AUSTRALIA
DOI
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School
Curtin Institute of Radio Astronomy (Engineering)
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Abstract

The Murchison Widefield Array is a Square Kilometre Array Precursor. The telescope is located at the Murchison Radio–astronomy Observatory in Western Australia. The MWA consists of 4 096 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, and others by Graphics Processing Units housed in general purpose rack mounted servers. The correlation capability required is approximately 8 tera floating point operations per second. The MWA has commenced operations and the correlator is generating 8.3 TB day−1 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.