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Published March 4, 2015 | Published + Accepted Version
Journal Article Open

The Murchison Widefield Array Correlator

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.

Additional Information

© 2015 Astronomical Society of Australia. Received October 10, 2014; Accepted January 22, 2015. We acknowledge the Wajarri Yamatji people as the traditional owners of the Observatory site. Initial correlator development was enabled by equipment supplied by an mM Shared University Research Grant (VUW & Curtin University), and by an htternal Research and Development Grant from the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. Support for the MWA comes from the U.S. National Science Foundation (grants AST CAREER-0847753, AST-0457585, AST-0908884 and PHY-0835713), the Australian Research Council (LIEF grants LE0775621 and LE0882938), the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research (grant FA9550-0510247), the Centre for All-sky Astrophysics (an Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence funded by grant CEl 10001020), New Zealand Ministry of Economic Development (grant MED-El 799), an mM Shared University Research Grant (via VUW & Curtin), the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, the MIT School of Science, the Raman Research Institute, the Australian National University, the Victoria University of Wellington, the Australian Federal government via the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy, Education Investment Fund and the Australia India Strategic Research Fund and Astronomy Australia Limited, under contract to Curtin University, the iVEC Petabyte Data Store, the Initiative in Innovative Computing and NVIDIA sponsored CUDA Center for Excellence at Harvard, and the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, a Joint Venture of Curtin University and The University of WA, funded by the Western Australian State government.

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Published - Ord_2015pe006.pdf

Accepted Version - 1501.05992v1.pdf

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Additional details

Created:
August 22, 2023
Modified:
October 23, 2023