Speaker
Description
Progress continues with MWAX, the MWA’s new 256-tile fringe-stopping, real-time correlator and beamformer. Cross-validation of visibility outputs against the existing correlator continues. The benchmark performance for 256 tiles has been positive and has validated the planned architecture of 24 GPU-accelerated servers for the current receiver architecture. Parallel work towards possible new 'Phase 3' receivers with over-sampling channelisers, different coarse channels bandwidths and increased data rates is under way. The optimum network, GPU selection and server configuration to best utilise these possible new receivers is currently under evaluation together with logistical considerations such as physical locations of equipment and wide area network implications. Downstream tools are beginning to be updated to ingest MWAX visibility sets and first-light images have been successfully generated. Work also continues on the real-time beamformer, a single software component that can form multiple simultaneous beams, a mixture of multiple incoherent beams (of differing time/frequency resolutions) and multiple tied-array beams (of differing directions on the sky). Both the correlator and beamformer ingest data from the new high-time-resolution UDP multicast stream, a feature which also allows other high time resolution consumers (for example, Breakthrough Listen and perhaps in the future an FRB detection pipeline, or any number of novel real-time processing applications) to commensally tap into the MWA data stream with no impact to observations.
