On the architecture for the X part of a very large FX correlator using two-accumulator CMACs

This paper presents an improved input-buffer architecture for the X part of a very large FX correlator that optimizes memory use to both increase performance and reduce the overall power consumption. The architecture uses an array of two-accumulator CMACs that are reused for different pairs of correlated signals. Using two accumulators in every CMAC allows the processing array to alternately correlate two sets of signal pairs selected in such a way so that they share some or all of the processed data samples. This leads to increased processing bandwidth and a significant reduction of the memory read rate due to not having to update some or all of the processing buffers in every second processing cycle. The overall memory access rate is at most 75 % of that of the single-accumulator CMAC array. This architecture is intended for correlators of very large multi-element radio telescopes such as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), and is suitable for an ASIC implementation.     

卫星定位精度对在轨甚低频干涉测量影响分析

由于地球电离层的阻挡以及其他干扰,在地面难以进行有效的甚低频天文观测,而使用搭载于绕地或绕月轨道卫星上的甚低频天线进行干涉观测会大大提高观测灵敏度和角分辨率.卫星定位精度会影响观测数据的处理结果,进而影响成图质量,并且会大幅影响飞行项目的复杂度和总成本.首先分析卫星姿态控制精度和星间基线测量精度对绕地轨道甚低频干涉观测的影响,之后对干涉观测中信号延时误差进行仿真,研究延时误差与数据相关处理中条纹搜索范围之间的关系,并对数据计算速度需求进行估算.分析和仿真结果可以辅助相关空间甚低频观测项目总体方案的制定和工程指标的优化.     

Phase shift sequences for an adding interferometer

Cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarimetry has the potential to provide revolutionary advances in cosmology. Future experiments to detect the very weak B-mode signal in CMB polarization maps will require unprecedented sensitivity and control of systematic errors. Bolometric interferometry may provide a way to achieve these goals. In a bolometric interferometer (or other adding interferometer), phase shift sequences are applied to the inputs in order to recover the visibilities. Noise is minimized when the phase shift sequences corresponding to all visibilities are orthogonal. We present a systematic method for finding sequences that produce this orthogonality, approximately minimizing both the length of the time sequence and the number of discrete phase shift values required. When some baselines are geometrically equivalent, we can choose sequences that read out those baselines simultaneously, which has been shown to improve the signal-to-noise ratio.     

The dynamic radio sky

Transient radio sources are necessarily compact and usually are the locations of explosive or dynamic events, therefore offering unique opportunities for probing fundamental physics and astrophysics. In addition, short-duration transients are powerful probes of intervening media owing to dispersion, scattering and Faraday rotation that modify the signals. While radio astronomy has an impressive record obtaining high time resolution, usually it is achieved in quite narrow fields of view. Consequently, the dynamic radio sky is poorly sampled, in contrast to the situation in the X-ray and γ-ray bands. The SKA has the potential to change this situation, opening up new parameter space in the search for radio transients. We summarize the wide variety of known and hypothesized radio transients and demonstrate that the SKA offers considerable power in exploring this parameter space. Requirements on the SKA to search the parameter space include the abilities to: (1) make targeted searches using beam forming capability; (2) conduct blind, all-sky surveys with dense sampling of the frequency–time plane in wide fields; (3) sample the sky with multiple fields of view from spatially well-separated sites in order to discriminate celestial and terrestrial signals; (4) utilize as much of the SKAs aggregate collecting area as possible in blind surveys, thus requiring a centrally condensed configuration, and; (5) localize repeating transient sources to high angular precision, requiring a configuration with long baselines, thus requiring collecting area in both a centrally condensed “core” array and sufficient area on long baselines.     

GPU accelerated radio astronomy signal convolution

The increasing array size of radio astronomy interferometers is causing the associated computation to scale quadratically with the number of array signals. Consequently, efficient usage of alternate processing architectures should be explored in order to meet this computational challenge. Affordable parallel processors have been made available to the general scientific community in the form of the commodity graphics card. This work investigates the use of the Graphics Processing Unit in the parallelisation of the combined conjugate multiply and accumulation stage of a correlator for a radio astronomy array. Using NVIDIA’s Compute Unified Device Architecture, our testing shows processing speeds from one to two orders of magnitude faster than a Central Processing Unit approach.     

利用国内VLBI网跟踪大椭圆轨道卫星

2004年7月,昆明VLBI站经过改造,由上海、乌鲁木齐和昆明站组成的中国VLBI网(CVN)采用统一的MARK4格式编制器和CVN硬盘记录系统,对大椭圆轨道卫星“探测1号”的2圈轨道的共同可视弧段进行了跟踪观测．软件相关处理程序已成功地用于检测卫星遥测信号的干涉条纹和数据相关处理．采用基于条纹幅度的加权最小二乘条纹拟合方法,获得了卫星VLBI观测量及其精度估计,完成了卫星VLBI观测量的3基线闭合误差检验．应用河外射电源校准方法和多频点相位校正信号提取方法,进行了台站钟差和仪器延迟等系统误差改正．经系统差改正后的卫星VLBI观测量序列已用于“探测1号”卫星的轨道确定．     

Solar radio filtering algorithm based on improved long short-term memory

The effective observation of burst events in solar radio research has been impeded by various interference signals,especially interference signals with a wide frequency range and high intensity,as they can partially or completely obscure the observation of burst events.Image processing methods that directly remove the interference signal channels and subtract the average of the interference signal channel are not suitable for processing all types of interference signals.This paper proposes the use of a specific kind of recurrent neural networks,called long short-term memory networks,to predict the value of the radio frequency interference signals with high intensity of the burst event in the solar radio spectrum.The predicted interference can then be removed in accordance with the principle that signals can be linearly added.Therefore,predicted value is subtracted from the data containing the burst event signals and the RFI signals(The radio frequency interference signals to be processed in this article refer to the signal of the broadcast signal that can be received in the frequency range,the signal transmitted by the mobile phone,and the signal transmitted by the sea vessel,and the like) to remove the interference.Then,in order to reduce the error caused by the stepwise prediction in the network and further improve the prediction accuracy,this paper analyzes the characteristics of the value of the radio interference and applies the digital mapping method to convert the prediction problem into the classification problem in the time series.The experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively remove the radio interference in the solar spectrum and clearly show the burst events.     

Submillimeter observations from space: A space station submillimeter facility (SSSF)

There are many important scientific problems to be attacked in the submillimeter wavelength region including the astrophysics of star formation, the dynamics of protoplanetary systems, the physics of interstellar gas, mass loss from stars, supernovae, the chemical evolution of galaxies, the star formation rates in galaxies, the astrophysics of active galactic nuclei, the deuterium abundance in different astrophysical environments, and the distribution of the cosmic background radiation. However, to effectively explore this wavelength range requires going into space since atmospheric absorption precludes most observations from the ground. As in most areas of astronomy, the twin needs for sensitivity and high redsolution indicate use of an imaging interferometer, but the needed baselines of a few tens-of-meters require a large physical structure. The planned Space Station will provide, for the first time, a platform which is large enough to accommodate a forefront submillimeter synthesis instrument. Such a telescope would open an entirely new wavelength regime to astronomy with the attendant possibilities for unexpected new discoveries.A submillimeter array would also be technically well suited for operation on the Space Station. Second-of-are resolution at submillimeter wavelengths requires only relatively short baselines; pointing accuracy and tracking stability requirements are relatively crude being determined by the single dish size rather than the array resolution; radio frequency interference (RFI) susceptibility is very low due to the large frequency separation from normal communications bands; emissions from co-orbiting debris, dust, gas, and water vapour are uncorrelated between interferometer elements; baseline stability requirements, while severe, are less stringent than for optical/IR interferometers and can almost certainly be satisfied for existing phase correction and phaseless image restoration techniques; and the technology for the dishes, mounts, receivers, LO/IF systems, and correlators either exists or is a reasonable extrapolation of what already is available on the ground.We consider the applications and possible design of a Space Station based submillimeter array which could be mounted along the main (Y) axis of the Space Station and use orbital revolution and precession to produce high-resolution synthesis mapping in much the same way ground-based linear arrays do by Earth rotation synthesis.     

微机数据流磁带机驱动接口和软件的研究

对于数据采集处理微机系统来说,采集预处理后的数据往往需要按预定的格式转换,再到功能更强的计算机上作进一步的处理,因此可装卸的大容量外存设备就显得日益重要。然而装备在PC机上的这类设备相应的驱动软件只支持固定的磁带文件格式,加之软硬件资料的缺乏,给这类设备的信息交换和高效使用带来了困难。本文针对微机上广泛使用的数据流磁带机,在硬件接口分析的基础上,全面描述我们新近开发的驱动软件包里的基本I/O过程,用户软件可方便地调用以实现对任意数据格式磁带进行读写。     

Pulsar sensitivity studies of the GLAST large area telescope

In this contribution we present our preliminary investigation on pulsar sensitivity of the Large Area Telescope, the main instrument aboard the GLAST mission. In particular we concentrated our attention to pulsars located at low galactic latitudes. We created a set of simulated pulsars having different fluxes in an array of galactic coordinates separated by a distance greater than the LAT Point Spread Function in order to avoid confusion between adjacent sources. Galactic gamma-ray sky background as used during the second LAT Data Challenge (DC2) is also included. We then run an automatic routine for testing periodicity for all the pulsars considering an opportune timing solution. In this way we can obtain a map of the sensitivity of the periodic searches for different fluxes and for various Galactic latitudes. Some assumptions have been made by simulating the pulsar sources, but this study is a first step toward an estimate for pulsed emission sensitivity of the GLAST LAT. The pulsed flux sensitivity profile we generate could also be input to a population synthesis code of Galactic pulsars in order to obtain more accurate predictions of the number of expected pulsar detections by GLAST. On behalf of the GLAST LAT Collaboration.     

RadioAstron Science Program Five Years after Launch: Main Science Results

The RadioAstron ground-space interferometer provides the highest angular resolution achieved now in astronomy. The detection of interferometric fringes from quasars with this angular resolution on baselines of 100–200 thousand km suggests the brightness temperatures which exceed the Compton limit by two orders of magnitude. Polarimetric measurements on ground-space baselines have revealed fine structure testifying to recollimation shocks on scales of 100–250 μas and a helical magnetic field near the base of radio emission in BL Lacertae. Substructure within a the scattering disk of pulsar emission on interferometer baselines (from 60000 to 250000 km) was discovered. This substructure is produced by action of the interstellar interferometer with an effective baseline of about 1 AU and the effective angular resolution of better than 1 μas. Diameters of scattering disks were measured for several pulsars, and distances to diffusing screens were evaluated. The ground-space observations of sources of the maser radiation in lines of water and hydroxyl have shown that the maser sources in star-forming regions remain unresolved on baselines, which considerably exceed the Earth diameter. These very compact and bright features with angular sizes of about 20–60 μas correspond to linear sizes of about 5–10 million km (several solar diameters).     

基于Mark5B＋GPU脉冲星观测系统

云南天文台40m射电望远镜进行的脉冲星观测数据量巨大,必须实现数据的实时处理,否则将会产生海量的数据积压.为实现这一目标,采用图形处理器架构,对Mark5B数据进行解码、消色散、折叠等处理.实验结果表明,对以1s8MB的实时采样,可以在0.51s内处理完成,从而实现了实时处理的要求.首先介绍这一观测系统各部分的图形处理器实现,然后相对于传统中央处理器构架,对各部分的运算速度进行了详细的对比.针对时间开销最大的消色散部分,分析了单次傅里叶变换的数据量大小对执行效率的影响.从系统最终的输出轮廓和柱状图上可以看到实时处理的结果符合要求.最后对存在的问题和未来的工作进行了讨论.     

TDMA／SS系统同步技术

目前，通信卫星系统普遍采用星上信号处理技术，为了满足高容量系统的要求，近几年发展了许多新的技术，其中为了解决多个点波束区域的通信，被称为时分多址／星上交换（TDMA／SS）技术便应运而生。因为使用TDMA时，一方面需要所有地球站的时间系统与同一参考源保持同步，另一方面，参考源也必须与卫星上的同步窗相关。二十世纪七十年代，许多学提出了各种各样的TDMA／SS同步解决方案，在此详细论述了TDMA／SS系统同步中的一些主要问题，对解决同步的方案作了比较，并分析了各种方案的特点。     

Real-time signal processor for pulsar studies

This paper describes the design, tests and preliminary results of a real-time parallel signal processor built to aid a wide variety of pulsar observations. The signal processor reduces the distortions caused by the effects of dispersion, Faraday rotation, doppler acceleration and parallactic angle variations, at a sustained data rate of 32 Msamples/sec. It also folds the pulses coherently over the period and integrates adjacent samples in time and frequency to enhance the signal-to-noise ratio. The resulting data are recorded for further off-line analysis of the characteristics of pulsars and the intervening medium. The signal processing for analysis of pulsar signals is quite complex, imposing the need for a high computational throughput, typically of the order of a Giga operations per second (GOPS). Conventionally, the high computational demand restricts the flexibility to handle only a few types of pulsar observations. This instrument is designed to handle a wide variety of Pulsar observations with the Giant Metre Wave Radio Telescope (GMRT), and is flexible enough to be used in many other high-speed, signal processing applications. The technology used includes field-programmable-gate-array(FPGA) based data/code routing interfaces, PC-AT based control, diagnostics and data acquisition, digital signal processor (DSP) chip based parallel processing nodes and C language based control software and DSP-assembly programs for signal processing. The architecture and the software implementation of the parallel processor are fine-tuned to realize about 60 MOPS per DSP node and a multiple-instruction-multiple-data (MIMD) capability.     

The Lofar Central Processing Facility Architecture

Reconfiguration is a key feature characteristic of the LOFAR telescope. Software platforms are utilised to program out the required data transformations in the generation of scientific end-products. Reconfigurable resources nowadays often replace the hard-wired processing systems from the past. This paper describes how this paradigm is implemented in a purely general-purpose telescope back-end. Experiences from high performance computing, stream processing and software engineering have been combined, leading to a state-of-the-art processing platform. The processing platform offers a total processing power of 35 TFlops, which is used to process a sustained input data- stream of 320 Gbps. The architecture of this platform is optimised for streaming data processing and offers appropriate processing resources for each step in the data processing chains. Typical data processing chains include Fourier transformations and correlation tasks along with controlling tasks such as fringe rotation correction. These tasks are defined in a high level programming language and mapped onto the available resources at run time. A scheduling system is used to control a collection of concurrently executing observations, providing each associated application with the appropriate resources to meet its timing constraint and give the integrated system the correct on-line and off-line look and feel.     

On Dimensionality Reduction for Indexing and Retrieval of Large-Scale Solar Image Data

This work investigates the applicability of several dimensionality reduction techniques for large-scale solar data analysis. Using a solar benchmark dataset that contains images of multiple types of phenomena, we investigate linear and nonlinear dimensionality reduction methods in order to reduce our storage and processing costs and maintain a good representation of our data in a new vector space. We present a comparative analysis of several dimensionality reduction methods and different numbers of target dimensions by utilizing different classifiers in order to determine the degree of data dimensionality reduction that can be achieved with these methods, and to discover the method that is the most effective for solar images. After determining the optimal number of dimensions, we then present preliminary results on indexing and retrieval of the dimensionally reduced data.     

GP S数据处理策略对成果精度的影响及可靠性分析

高精度全球定位系统(Global Positioning System,GPS)数据处理的成果精度往往受海潮模型、卫星轨道约束模式、星历产品等数据类型及处理策略的制约.在考虑上述影响因素的前提下进行相关实验,并基于误差理论提出一种增加基线解算次数组合平差的方法,以提高基线解算精度.实验结果表明,数据处理中置入海潮模型较...     

The Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array: overview & status

The Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) is an international millimeter-wavelength radio telescope under construction in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. ALMA will be situated on a high-altitude site at 5000 m elevation which provides excellent atmospheric transmission over the instrument wavelength range of 0.3 to 3 mm. ALMA will be comprised of two key observing components—a main array of up to sixty-four 12-m diameter antennas arranged in a multiple configurations ranging in size from 0.15 to ∼18 km, and a set of four 12-m and twelve 7-m antennas operating in a compact array ∼50 m in diameter (known as the Atacama Compact Array, or ACA), providing both interferometric and total-power astronomical information. High-sensitivity dual-polarization 8 GHz-bandwidth spectral-line and continuum measurements between all antennas will be available from two flexible digital correlators. At the shortest planned wavelength and largest configuration, the angular resolution of ALMA will be 0.005″. The instrument will use superconducting (SIS) mixers to provide the lowest possible receiver noise contribution, and special-purpose water vapor radiometers to assist in calibration of atmospheric phase distortions. A complex optical fiber network will transmit the digitized astronomical signals from the antennas to the correlators in the Array Operations Site Technical Building, and post-correlation to the lower-altitude Operations Support Facility where the array will be controlled, and initial construction and maintenance of the instrument will occur. ALMA Regional Centers in the US, Europe, Japan and Chile will provide the scientific portals for the use of ALMA; early science observations are expected in 2010, with full operations in 2012.     

多棱镜分光膜的镀制

云南天文台新研制的低纬子午环光路中有两套多棱镜系统 ,它的作用是产生多路光作几个方向准直器校准光路 ,提高测量精度。我们考虑到光源和接收器件二极管阵的光谱响应曲线不同 ,光路中入射光需要通过多个分光膜面 ,而多路光的出射光谱应相等 ,因此采用不同层次的介质膜 ,使之达到作用效果。