Bibcode
Pisano, Jim; Amestica, Rodrigo; Perez, Jesus
Bibliographical reference
Advanced Software, Control, and Communication Systems for Astronomy. Edited by Lewis, Hilton; Raffi, Gianni. Proceedings of the SPIE, Volume 5496, pp. 146-154 (2004).
Advertised on:
9
2004
Citations
0
Refereed citations
0
Description
We present a design for the computer systems which control, configure,
and monitor the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) correlator and
process its output. Two distinct computer systems implement this
functionality: a rack- mounted PC controls and monitors the correlator,
and a cluster of 17 PCs process the correlator output into raw spectral
results. The correlator computer systems interface to other ALMA
computers via gigabit Ethernet networks utilizing CORBA and raw socket
connections. ALMA Common Software provides the software infrastructure
for this distributed computer environment. The control computer
interfaces to the correlator via multiple CAN busses and the data
processing computer cluster interfaces to the correlator via sixteen
dedicated high speed data ports. An independent array-wide hardware
timing bus connects to the computer systems and the correlator hardware
ensuring synchronous behavior and imposing hard deadlines on the control
and data processor computers. An aggregate correlator output of 1
gigabyte per second with 16 millisecond periods and computational data
rates of approximately 1 billion floating point operations per second
define other hard deadlines for the data processing computer cluster.