An Efficient Real-time Data Pipeline for the CHIME Pathfinder Radio Telescope X-Engine

Understand

The CHIME Pathfinder is a new interferometric radio telescope that uses a hybrid FPGA/GPU FX correlator.

• The GPU-based X-engine of this correlator processes over 819 Gb/s of 4+4-bit complex astronomical data from N=256 inputs across a 400 MHz radio band.
• A software framework is presented to manage this real-time data flow, which allows each of 16 processing servers to handle 51.2 Gb/s of astronomical data, plus 8 Gb/s of ancillary data.
• Each server receives data in the form of UDP packets from an FPGA F-engine over the eight 10 GbE links, combines data from these packets into large (32MB-256MB) buffered frames, and transfers them to multiple GPU co-processors for correlation.