Digital Instrumentation for the Radio Astronomy Community: The Next Generation of CASPER

天文信号处理和电子研究合作组织（CASPER）成立于11年前，旨在为射电天文学开发专门的计算方法。从那时起，它已经成为一个由全世界数百名科学家和工程师组成的社区，他们的方法在射电天文学中无处不在。这种数值密集型的方法需要高性能的计算硬件和专门设计的软件。这种硬件的成本下降和技术进步意味着旧的CASPER方法有过时的危险。该项目将开发CASPER工具包的现代版本，称为JASPER。这个新的工具箱将使广泛的科学发现成为可能。该合作还因为学生和早期职业研究人员提供培训而闻名。该项目将继续进行，非常成功的会议，为学者提供此类培训和行业联系。pi还计划将JASPER工具包作为开放源代码发布，并通过确保感兴趣的研究人员能够为JASPER代码库做出贡献，以围绕该语言构建现有的用户社区。这将使该项目得到更广泛的发展。高级网络基础设施办公室的软件集群对这方面特别感兴趣，该办公室为该奖项提供了共同资金。该项目将更新当前提供的现场可编程门阵列（FPGA）设计工具和软件，以支持最新一代硬件。初步开发工作已经开始。该项目将扩展为一个灵活的、文档完备的框架。该奖项还将支持从昂贵的专有平台（如Matlab、Simulink）向免费的、用Python编写的开源软件的持续迁移。它利用了计算机行业的进步，这已经超过了射电天文学的硬件发展。该项目将提供基础设施，以经济有效地建造下一代天文仪器，包括宽带光谱仪、瞬态探测机、大N相关器和高像素计数毫米波相机。

The Collaboration for Astronomy Signal Processing and Electronics Research (CASPER) was founded eleven years ago to develop specialized computational methods for radio astronomy. It has since become a community of hundreds of scientists and engineers worldwide and their methods have become ubiquitous throughout radio astronomy. Such numerically intensive methods require high-performance computing hardware and specially designed software. Declining costs and technological advance of this hardware mean that old CASPER methods are in danger of becoming obsolete. This project will develop a modern version of the CASPER toolkit, known as JASPER. This new toolkit will enable a wide range of scientific discoveries. The collaboration is also known for providing training for students and early career researchers. This project will continue ongoing, highly successful conferences that provide such training and industry contacts for academics. The PIs also plan to release the JASPER toolkit as open source and build upon the existing user community around the language by ensuring that interested researchers are able to contribute to the JASPER codebase. This will allow a wider growth of the project. This aspect is of special interest to the software cluster in the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure, which has provided co-funding for this award.This project will update the current offering of Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) design tools and software to support the latest generation of hardware. Preliminary development has already begun. This project will expand into a flexible, well documented framework. This award will also support continued migration away from expensive proprietary platforms (i.e. Matlab, Simulink) toward freely available, open source software written in Python. It leverages progress in the computing industry, which has surpassed hardware development in radio astronomy. This project will provide infrastructure to cost-effectively build the next generation of astronomical instrumentation, including wide-band spectrometers, transient-detection machines, large N correlators and high-pixel-count, millimeter wave cameras.