Africanus III. pfb-imaging–A flexible radio interferometric imaging suite

Abstract

The popularity of the CLEAN algorithm in radio interferometric imaging stems from its maturity, speed, and robustness. While many alternatives have been proposed in the literature, none have achieved mainstream adoption by astronomers working with data from interferometric arrays operating in the big data regime. This lack of adoption is largely due to increased computational complexity, absence of mature implementations, and the need for astronomers to tune obscure algorithmic parameters. This work introduces pfb-imaging: a flexible library that implements the scaffolding required to develop and accelerate general radio interferometric imaging algorithms. We demonstrate how the framework can be used to implement a sparsity-based image reconstruction technique known as (unconstrained) SARA in a way that scales with image size rather than data volume and features interpretable algorithmic parameters. The implementation is validated on terabyte-sized data from the MeerKAT telescope, using both a single compute node and Amazon Web Services computing instances.