Kamputed Limited, SKA.Mid.CBF Team

“Towards 10% of a Square Kilometer Array Telescope”

Tuesday 14 February, 2.40pm – 3.15pm

Abstract

The Square Kilometer Array Telescope was just begun construction of phase one, with 5 years to deliver two telescopes, each with a collecting area of just 10% of the full million square meters of antenna collecting area. Even at this limited scale the computing challenges are significant. I will talk about the size of the problem, how the design is partitioned, so that it can be scaled through the delivery milestones.
We will explore some problems in the transport of the huge volumes of data, and some techniques I am proposing to alleviate the pressure.

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.

Slides