The Effelsberg Direct Digitization Backend

Recent developments in high-speed networking and PCIe-mounted accelerator cards have made possible new backend designs that provide vastly improved flexibility and capability in signal processing for radio astronomy. While direct digitization close to the receiver improves the quality of the physical signal by reducing analog transmission and filtering losses, it also enables the building of a backend based on commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware that is able to exploit modern cloud computing paradigms.

The Effelsberg Direct Digitization (EDD) backend takes advantage of these benefits. The EDD backend orchestrates data processing on COTS computing systems hosting GPUs as well as FPGA that can be rapidly and easily adapted to a wide range of observing use cases, e.g. spectroscopy, polarimetry, pulsar timing, etc. The highly modular system is build of multiple micro services with a unified interface to control its subsystems. This design abstracts the telescope into well defined components suitable for deployment with only minimal customisation to individual radio observatories.

This document describes the design principels and current configuration of the EDD version 0.1, last updated Sep 25, 2024.

• Introduction
• Pipelines
  • Available Pipelines
• Core Services
  • Master Controller
  • Telescope State
  • Monitoring
• The Provisioning System
  • Provision Descriptions
  • Pipeline Roles
  • Inventory
  • Basic Configuring and Deployment on a new Cluster
• Monitoring
  • Modify Existing Dashboards
  • Adding New Dashboards
• Telescope Specific Components
  • Status Server
  • SCPI Interface
  • FITS Writer Interface
  • Blocking Client
• Deploying the EDD
  • Requirements
  • Basic Steps
• Appendix
  • Writing Documentaton

Index

Todo

Describe master controller a specialized pipelien here (+include mikat module doc)

(The original entry is located in /builds/mpifr-bdg/edd_documentation/core_services.rst, line 7.)

Todo

Telescope state is exposed to components that need information. Describe mecahnism here.

(The original entry is located in /builds/mpifr-bdg/edd_documentation/core_services.rst, line 13.)

Todo

Dscibe monitoring system and injection of provisioined dashboards.

(The original entry is located in /builds/mpifr-bdg/edd_documentation/core_services.rst, line 19.)

Todo

Rename container_name to pipeline_id

(The original entry is located in /builds/mpifr-bdg/edd_documentation/provisioning.rst, line 90.)

Todo

These variables should be set by default inside the role,w ith the option to be overriden on later levels.

(The original entry is located in /builds/mpifr-bdg/edd_documentation/provisioning.rst, line 516.)

Todo

Describe Fits writer interface

(The original entry is located in /builds/mpifr-bdg/edd_documentation/telescope_specific_components.rst, line 41.)

Todo

Describe Blocking Client (TCS USB Interface) here

(The original entry is located in /builds/mpifr-bdg/edd_documentation/telescope_specific_components.rst, line 48.)