Professional Open-Source Radio Astronomy

The Square Kilometer Array radio astronomy telescope will be one of the world's largest scientific instruments, spanning half the globe, with components distributed across Africa and Australia.

The MeerKAT telescope, one of its precursors, is currently under construction in South Africa and uses fully open-source software and hardware for primary signal processing operations. When completed next year, it will be the world's most sensitive L-band array.

This talk will discuss the telescopes and their unique challenges which drive the development of open-source hardware and software to process the deluge of data. I will introduce four generations of open-source FPGA hardware along with the collaboratively-developed ecosystem of software and DSP libraries.

• Video