Dr
Jeff Kern
(NRAO / ALMA)
24/03/2010, 16:00
The Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) is among the largest ground-based astronomical projects undertaken to date. The SKA will face many of the same challenges as ALMA: development in a distributed environment, deployment in a remote location, and a large international collaboration plus the technical challenges of building a complex, flexible and cutting edge...
Dr
Jongsoo Kim
(University of Cambridge)
24/03/2010, 16:20
Signal Transport, Signal Processing, Software, and Data Management
Phase I of the SKA will comprise of about 10% of the final
collecting area. It is likely that a software correlator will
be used for early science. Assuming 300 antennas, 4 GHz
bandwidth, and two polarizations, the required performance of
the software correlator for auto and cross correlations is 5.76
Peta FLOPS (Floating Operations Per Second), which is just
about three times larger...
Dr
Swaminathan Natarajan
(Tata Research Development & Design Centre, Tata Consultancy Services)
24/03/2010, 16:35
Signal Transport, Signal Processing, Software, and Data Management
This presentation identifies scalability challenges associated with Monitoring & Control and some possible solution approaches.
• Automated control and coordination of distributed, heterogenous elements. Guiding architectural principle: semi-autonomous control, where parent nodes specify objectives and child nodes work out how to achieve objective given local constraints. Provide...
Dr
Kiri Wagstaff
(Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology)
24/03/2010, 16:50
The Square Kilometer Array (SKA) poses complex new challenges for high time resolution observations. The traditional operational approach of archiving and analyzing the data offline will not be possible given the unprecedented data rates that will be generated by the SKA. We are developing machine learning methods that exploit learned statistical properties of the data stream to enable...
Mr
André Offringa
(Kapteyn Astronomical Institute)
24/03/2010, 17:05
Signal Transport, Signal Processing, Software, and Data Management
The LOFAR telescope embeds various techniques to deal with radio frequency interference (RFI). One of these techniques is a completely automated post-correlation flagger. For this purpose, several post-correlation classification methods for efficient detection and flagging of RFI have been designed and compared. Currently, the selected flagging strategy is the “SumThreshold” method, which...
Dr
Oleg Smirnov
(ASTRON)
24/03/2010, 17:20
Signal Transport, Signal Processing, Software, and Data Management
The WSRT is a very "dynamic range-friendly" instrument due to its design (equatorial mounts, stable beams & pointings, tiny closure errors), and is capable of achieving over a million dynamic range in a single 12-hour run with regular selfcalibration. Still, even the best WSRT maps show significant artifacts from direction-dependent effects (DDEs) that selfcal does not address. At 21cm, these...
Dr
Stefan Wijnholds
(ASTRON)
24/03/2010, 17:35
Signal Transport, Signal Processing, Software, and Data Management
The moderate resolution and high brightness sensitivity of the SKA core may be exploited to study the diffuse structures in our Galaxy, the IGM and the cosmic web. The combination of high sensitivity and moderate resolution leads to confusion limited maps at each frequency from which the source components along each line-of-sight may be extracted by exploiting the difference in spectral...
Dr
Kristian Zarb Adami
(University of Oxford)
24/03/2010, 17:50
Signal Transport, Signal Processing, Software, and Data Management
In this work, I will present a summary of the beamforming techniques, both in the RF and in the digital domain used for aperture arrays in the SKA. In particular I will show results of the Two-Polarisation All-Digital (2-PAD) Aperture Array demonstrator designed and built in the UK as part of SKADS. Further to this, I will present new techniques including the Fast-Fourier Transform Telescope...
