Accelerating software radio astronomy FX correlation with GPU and FPGA co-processors

• Main Author: Woods, Andrew
• Other Authors: Inggs, Michael
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: University of Cape Town 2015
• Subjects: Electrical Engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/11427/12212

Includes abstract. === Includes bibliographical references (leaves [117]-121). === This thesis attempts to accelerate compute intensive sections of a frequency domain radio astronomy correlator using dedicated co-processors. Two co-processor implementations were made independently with one using reconfigurable hardware (Xilinx Virtex 4LXlOO) and the other uses a graphics processor (Nvidia 9800GT). The objective of a radio astronomy correlator is to compute the complex valued correlation products for each baseline which can be used to reconstruct the sky's radio brightness distribution. Radio astronomy correlators have huge computation demands and this dissertation focuses on the computational aspects of correlation, concentrating on the X-engine stage of the correlator.