Title:	The Murchison widefield array correlator
Authors:	Ord, S.M. Deshpande, A.A. Prabu, T. Udaya Shankar, N. Srivani, K.S. Subrahmanyan, Ravi +35 Co-authors
Issue Date:	4-Mar-2015
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press for Astronomical Society of Australia
Citation:	Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia,2015,Vol.32, e005
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
Description:	Restricted Access. An open-access version is available at arXiv.org (one of the alternative locations)
URI:	http://hdl.handle.net/2289/6243
ISSN:	1323-3580 1448-6083(online)
Alternative Location:	http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2015PASA...32....6O http://arxiv.org/abs/1501.05992 http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/pasa.2015.5
Copyright:	2015 Astronomical Society of Australia
Appears in Collections:	Research Papers (A&A)

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