The UTMOST: A hybrid digital signal processor transforms the MOST

Understand

The Molonglo Observatory Synthesis Telescope (MOST) is an 18,000 square meter radio telescope situated some 40 km from the city of Canberra, Australia.

• Its operating band (820-850 MHz) is now partly allocated to mobile phone communications, making radio astronomy challenging.
• We describe how the deployment of new digital receivers (RX boxes), Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based filterbanks and server-class computers equipped with 43 GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) has transformed MOST into a versatile new instrument (the UTMOST) for studying the dynamic radio sky on millisecond timescales, ideal for work on pulsars and Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs).
• The filterbanks, servers and their high-speed, low-latency network form part of a hybrid solution to the observatory's signal processing requirements.