Daily Image
02-11-2018
LOFAR Station Upgrade Architecture Review
| Submitter: | Albert-Jan Boonstra and René Kaptijn |
| Description: | The International LOFAR telescope is the world's largest low-frequency radio telescope, and through the recently awarded grant for the DUPLLO development project it will increase its sensitivity even further. This upgrade project also aims at enabling simultaneous observations in the LBA and HBA frequency bands, improving ionospheric distortion characterization capabilities. This will enable high image fidelity observations also at the lowest frequencies. Increasing the number of antennas to be processed at each LOFAR station obviously requires an upgrade of the station electronics. To limit the number of design options for the upcoming preliminary design review, it was decided to have a station electronics architecture assessment as a first step. For this, we conducted a broad sweep of options ranging from configurable chips (FPGAs) that have very high input-output data rates (I/O) but are difficult to write code for, computer graphics chips (GPUs) that have limited I/O capabilities but are easy to program, 'standard' computer chips (CPUs) with programming ease similar to that of GPUs, digital processor chips (DSPs) that are extremely difficult to write code for, and hybrid systems. In our analysis we scored cost, power consumption, scalability, ease of programming, technology readiness level, dimensioning of the system, and schedule. To cut a long story short, it turned out that FPGA based systems still are the overall best choice in this part of the signal processing chain. This was both the conclusion of the architecture team and the review panel that visited us on October 3. The picture above shows Gijs Schoonderbeek explaining the different design options to the review panel. |
| Copyright: | ASTRON |
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