Throughout Europe a large collection of 54 stations each with hundreds of antennae collect a large amount of data for radio astronomy. These stations separated by 2000 kilometers of distance combine at a core of 24 stations in Exloo, the Netherlands and two HPC clusters in Groningen, the Netherlands. Together this entire system is known as the LOw Frequency ARray (LOFAR).
This talk focuses on the 400gbps datastream and aggregation across the 2000 kilometers distance between stations and how both a GPU and CPU cluster translate these data into images. We will cover the open-source tools that enable this processing, discover some of the history about our clusters, gain insights into some of the pipelines and steps to do data transformations and finally show you some of LOFARs current achievements and future directions.
Speakers: Corne Lukken