PetaOp/second Astronomy Signal Processing using FPGA's:
How to Develop Instrumentation in Four Months instead of Four Years

Dan Werthimer (SSL)

Next generation radio telescopes, such as the Allen Telescope Array and the Square Kilometer Array are composed of hundreds to thousands of smaller telescopes; these large arrays require peta-ops per second of real time processing to combine telescope signals and generate images. I will briefly describe these telescopes and the motivation for peta-op supercomputing, as well as some of the low cost, rapid development instrumentation our group is developing.

Field Programmable Gate Arrays Chips (FGPA's) are 100 times faster than a pentium and use much less power; but FGPA's have until recently, been extremely hard to program. I'll present some of the new software tools that make it easy to program FPGA's (even an astronomer can do it!), some general purpose tinker-toy hardware modules one can use to build a variety of digital instrumentation (spectrometers, imagers, etc), and how our group built six instruments in the last 18 months.