Journal article
WSCLEAN: an implementation of a fast, generic wide-field imager for radio astronomy
AR Offringa, B McKinley, N Hurley-Walker, FH Briggs, RB Wayth, DL Kaplan, ME Bell, L Feng, AR Neben, JD Hughes, J Rhee, T Murphy, NDR Bhat, G Bernardi, JD Bowman, RJ Cappallo, BE Corey, AA Deshpande, D Emrich, A Ewall-Wice Show all
MONTHLY NOTICES OF THE ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY | OXFORD UNIV PRESS | Published : 2014
Abstract
Astronomical wide-field imaging of interferometric radio data is computationally expensive, especially for the large data volumes created by modern non-coplanar many-element arrays. We present a new wide-field interferometric imager that uses the w-stacking algorithm and can make use of the w-snapshot algorithm. The performance dependences of CASA's w-projection and our new imager are analysed and analytical functions are derived that describe the required computing cost for both imagers. On data from the Murchison Widefield Array, we find our new method to be an order of magnitude faster than w-projection, as well as being capable of full-sky imaging at full resolution and with correct pola..
View full abstractRelated Projects (3)
Grants
Awarded by US National Science Foundation
Awarded by Australian Research Council
Awarded by US Air Force Office of Scientific Research
Awarded by Centre for All-sky Astrophysics (an Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence)
Awarded by Victoria University of Wellington from the New Zealand Ministry of Economic Development
Funding Acknowledgements
ARO would like to thank O. M. Smirnov for testing WSCLEAN on VLA data. This scientific work makes use of the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory, operated by CSIRO. We acknowledge the Wajarri Yamatji people as the traditional owners of the Observatory site. Support for the MWA comes from the US National Science Foundation (grants AST-0457585, PHY-0835713, CAREER-0847753, and AST-0908884), the Australian Research Council (LIEF grants LE0775621 and LE0882938), the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research (grant FA9550-0510247), and the Centre for All-sky Astrophysics (an Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence funded by grant CE110001020). Support is also provided by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, the MIT School of Science, the Raman Research Institute, the Australian National University, and the Victoria University of Wellington (via grant MEDE1799 from the New Zealand Ministry of Economic Development and an IBM Shared University Research Grant). The Australian Federal government provides additional support via the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy, Education Investment Fund, and the Australia India Strategic Research Fund, and Astronomy Australia Limited, under contract to Curtin University. We acknowledge the iVEC Petabyte Data Store, the Initiative in Innovative Computing and the CUDA Center for Excellence sponsored by NVIDIA at Harvard University, and the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), a Joint Venture of Curtin University and The University of Western Australia, funded by the Western Australian State government.