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

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.

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

Department of Electrical Engineering

Year dc:date.issued

2010

Author dc:creator

• Woods, Andrew

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Inggs, Michael

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/11427/12212

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/12212