Ultra-Wideband Signal Processor
To efficiently process ~3.3 GHz of bandwidth on Murriyang, CSIRO’s Parkes radio telescope, CSIRO uses Fourier Space’s data capture software and pulsar signal processor. Our flexible libraries support pulsar timing and polarimetry with phase-coherent dispersion removal, searching for pulsars and fast radio bursts, and high resolution spectroscopy.
The Murriyang ultra-wideband signal processor (Medusa) interfaces with CSIRO’s UWL digitiser, which outputs 26 dual-polarization sub-bands, each with a bandwidth of 128 MHz, spanning 704 – 4032 MHz and quantized with 16 bits per sample, streamed in the VDIF packet format. The data acquisition rate is 213 Gb/s.
The Medusa software executes on six servers, each equipped with two CPUs with 128 GB DDR3 memory, dual 100Gb NICs, four A10 Nvidia GPUs, and three SSDs configured in a RAID volume.
Medusa implements four modes of operation.
Voltage Capture
Records unprocessed baseband voltage data as received from the digitiser. This mode is used primarily during development, integration, verification and early commissioning.
Pulsar Search and Single Pulse
Records full-polarization channelized time series with configurable temporal and spectral resolution and optional phase-coherent dispersion removal. Data are output as PSRFITS search mode files.
Pulsar Fold
Performs phase-coherent dispersion removal and pulsar longitude-resolved integration of full-polarization data. Data are output as PSRFITS fold mode files, supporting high-precision pulsar timing experiments such as the international effort to detect low-frequency gravitational waves.
Spectral Line / Continuum
Each of the 128-MHz sub-bands can be further channelized in up to 2097152 channels with 61 Hz spectral resolution. Either one, two or four polarization products can be formed and integrated between ~0.26 and 60 seconds. Data are output as SDHDF files.