Cluster Computers and Grid Processing in the First Radio-Telescope of a New Generation
CCGRID '01 Proceedings of the 1st International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid
Vectorization techniques for the Blue Gene/L double FPU
IBM Journal of Research and Development
ZOID: I/O-forwarding infrastructure for petascale architectures
Proceedings of the 13th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and practice of parallel programming
Using many-core hardware to correlate radio astronomy signals
Proceedings of the 23rd international conference on Supercomputing
The LOFAR correlator: implementation and performance analysis
Proceedings of the 15th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming
I/O streaming evaluation of batch queries for data-intensive computational turbulence
Proceedings of 2011 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis
Efficient deadlock avoidance for streaming computation with filtering
Proceedings of the 17th ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming
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LOFAR is the first of a new generation of radio telescopes, that combines the signals from many thousands of simple, fixed antennas, rather than from expensive dishes. Its revolutionary design and unprecedented size enables observations in a frequency range that could hardly be observed before, and allows the study of a vast amount of new science cases.In this paper, we describe a novel approach to process realtime, streaming telescope data in software, using a supercomputer. The desire for a flexible and reconfigurable instrument demands a software solution, where traditionally customized hardware was used. This, and LOFAR's exceptional real-time, streaming signalprocessing requirements compel the use of a supercomputer. We focus on the LOFAR CEntral Processing facility (CEP), that combines the signals of all LOFAR stations. CEP consists of a 12,288-core IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer, embedded in several conventional clusters.We describe a highly optimized implementation that will do the bulk of the central signal processing on the Blue Gene/L, namely PolyPhase Filtering, Delay Compensation, and Correlation. Measurements show that we reach exceptionally high computational performance (up to 98% of the theoretical floating-point peak performance). We also discuss how we handle external I/O performance limitations into and out of the Blue Gene/L, to obtain sufficient bandwidth for LOFAR.