Quinten: bringing LOFAR digital processing to the next level
Andre Gunst; Astron, NL.
Abstract:
After the succesfull development of the LOFAR digital boards, a new initiative further refered to as Quinten is taken by ASTRON. In this talk the goals and capabilities of Quinten will be presented.
The technological goal for the Quinten development is to increase the currently achieved 160 GMAC for the LOFAR Remote Station Processing (RSP) boards to 920 GMAC on a single board. Moreover the input bandwidth will be increased from 30 Gbps to 160 Gbps.
Quinten needs to be designed such that a number of applications can be mapped on this architecture. Amongst them are: enhanced LOFAR beamforming to generate more digital beams, a correlator for focal plane arrays in the Westerbork dishes and a demonstrator for a next generation JIVE correlator.