The Murchison Wideeld Array (MWA) is a next-generation radio telescope currently under construction in the remote Western Australia Outback. Raw data will be generated continuously at 5 GiB s 1 , grouped into 8 s cadences. This high throughput motivates the development of on-site, real time processing and reduction in preference to archiving, transport and o-line processing. Each batch of 8 s data must be completely reduced before the next batch arrives. Maintaining real time operation will require a sustained performance of around 2:5 TFLOP s 1 (including convolutions, FFTs, interpolations and matrix multiplications). We describe a scalable heterogeneous computing pipeline implementation, exploiting both the high computing density and FLOP-perWatt ratio of modern GPUs. The architecture is highly parallel within and across nodes, with all major processing elements performed by GPUs. Necessary scatter-gather operations along the pipeline are loosely synchronized between the nodes hosting the GPUs. The MWA will be a frontier scientic instrument and a pathnder for planned peta- and exascale facilities.
['Richard G. Edgar', 'M. A. Clark', 'Kevin Dale', 'D. A. Mitchell', 'S. M. Ord', 'Randall B. Wayth', 'Hanspeter Pfister', 'Lincoln J. Greenhill']
Enabling a High Throughput Real Time Data Pipeline for a Large Radio Telescope Array with GPUs