Digital Instrumentation for the Research Community: The Next Generation of CASPER

该项目由加州大学伯克利分校的天文学家领导，涉及天文学家、物理学家、工程师和计算机科学家的国际社区，共同开发用于射电天文学研究的高性能数字仪器。 该合作开发开源硬件，软件，库，工具和仪器设计，使研究人员能够以具有成本效益和及时的方式实现实现其科学目标所需的仪器。 这些产品为射电天文学的发展提供支持，从本科教学实验室的小型实验到天文学研究前沿的望远镜，如事件视界望远镜。 天文信号处理和电子研究合作组织（CASPER）的研究成果为射电天文学信号处理仪器的开发带来了革命性的成本和时间规模。超过1000个卡斯珀设计的现场可编程门阵列（FPGA）平台已部署在全球约100台仪器中。CASPER的基础设施支持了一系列尖端的射电天文学计划，例如：探测再电离时代（了解第一批恒星和星系是如何形成的），NANOGrav（利用恒星作为引力波探测器）和Event Horizon Telescope（成像我们银河系中心的黑洞）。CASPER的成功归功于其软件工具和库，这些工具和库的设计目标是简化仪器开发，降低新仪器设计师的进入门槛。该计划将利用CASPER社区过去的工作，结合超级计算行业的当前发展，提供基础设施，以经济有效地构建下一代天文仪器。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This project, led by astronomers at the University of California – Berkeley, involves an international community of astronomers, physicists, engineers, and computer scientists working together to develop high performance digital instrumentation for radio astronomy research. The collaboration develops open source hardware, software, libraries, tools, and instrument designs, enabling researchers to implement the instrumentation needed to achieve their science goals in a cost effective and timely manner. These products provide support for developments in radio astronomy ranging from small experiments in undergraduate teaching labs to telescopes at the frontier of astronomy research such as the Event Horizon Telescope. The instrumentation provided by this collaboration is also used in brain research, genomics, radar applications, and neutron and magnetic field imaging.Research from the Collaboration for Astronomy Signal Processing and Electronics Research (CASPER) has revolutionized the cost and time scale for development of radio astronomy signal processing instrumentation. Over a thousand CASPER-designed Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) platforms have been deployed in roughly one hundred instruments around the world. CASPER infrastructure has supported a range of cutting edge radio astronomy programs such as; detecting the Epoch of Reionization (learning how the first stars and galaxies formed), NANOGrav (utilizing pulsars as gravitational wave detectors), and the Event Horizon Telescope (imaging the black hole at the center of our galaxy). CASPER owes its success to its software tools and libraries, which were designed with the goal of streamlining instrument development, and lowering the barriers of entry to new instrument designers. This proposal will leverage this past work of the CASPER community, in tandem with the current developments in the super-computing industry, to provide the infrastructure to cost effectively build the next generation of astronomical instrumentation.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.