Consulting HPC, FPGA Engineer – SKA Central Signal Processors, Kamputed Ltd. New Zealand.

“Maximising Compute and Minimising Resources in the Square Kilometer Array.“

Abstract

The Square Kilometer Array is finally in the construction phase, with the first receptors iminent. Five years remain to deliver the two telescopes, each with just 10% of the full million square meters of antenna collecting area. Even at this limited scale the computing challenges are significant, with raw input data rates of 2.5TB/s, 24 hrs/day, 365.25 days/year.
I will talk about the size of the problem, how the design of the correlator is partitioned, so that it can be scaled through the delivery milestones to reach 197 receptors.
As usual in large projects there is extreme pressure to minimise cost and maximise utility.
We will explore some methods I employ in the Mid.CBF FPGA based correlator to maximise the computing performance while minimising cost.

Bio

William is a computer engineer who is occasionally tempted into the academic world. His area of work and interest is in high performance computing using FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array).
He likes to challenge the conventional assumptions in computing to build higher performance machines that consume less power. FPGA technologies provide him the latitude to explore digital computing with non-von-Neumann architectures.

Will has a Ph.D from the University of Canterbury (NZ) where he researched redundant number systems, their implementation in FPGA, and applications. A redundant number system is one where there are multiple ways of representing some (or all) numbers. These different representations can be exploited to achieve increases in performance, and decreases in power, but come with additional hardware costs.

Will is currently the Lead FPGA engineer for the SKA Mid-frequency Correlator and Beamfomer (SKA.Mid.CBF) Team that has been assembled by the Canadian National Research Council and primary contractor MDA. Will has been involved full time with the SKA project since 2015 and is now consulting through his company Kamputed, working from Hamilton, New Zealand.

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Click to download 2024 Slides as pdf.

Video 2024

Will is a returning speaker. Please refer to his 2023 talk “Towards 10% of a Square Kilometer Array Telescope” and watch his interview.