Design of a multibeam spectrometer for the Green Bank Telescope

Abstract

A new multi-beam spectrometer for the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) is being designed and built by a partnership between the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) and the University of California at Berkeley, and partially funded by a National Science Foundation Advanced Technology Instrumentation grant. The spectrometer is a heterogeneous computing device based on a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) front-end and a heterogeneous compute server backend, comprised of Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) and x86 CPUs. Working together, the hardware in this system provides processing power to analyse up to 8 dual-polarization or 16 single-polarization inputs, at bandwidths of up to 1.25 GHz per input. An aggregate of up to 10 GHz of bandwidth, dual polarization, may be processed with the spectrometer.