high performance computing on graphics processing units: hgpu.org

Radio astronomy is a subfield of astronomy that studies celestial objects at radio frequencies. Unlike visible light, these radio signals are not blocked by earth’s atmosphere, making it possible to detect them from the ground. Radio emissions have been observed from a number of celestial bodies, including stars and galaxies. Some celestial bodies that can only be observed by radio emission are radio galaxies, pulsars, quasars and masers. Traditionally, radio astronomy is conducted using a radio telescope. A radio telescope consists of a large dish which can be aimed in a particular direction. The telescope’s field of view determines the area of the sky that can be observed. The received radio signals are processed by dedicated hardware in a pipeline. A pipeline is a series of consecutive signal processing stages, the result of which is analyzed by astronomers. The exact stages in the pipeline depend on what one wants to study. The problems with this approach are apparent when bigger telescopes are built to observe more frequencies and with a larger field of view. First, dishes are becoming too large and contain moving parts which are very expensive to maintain. Second, dedicated hardware is becoming too expensive to design and build and cannot be reconfigured for different pipelines.