The EDD Radio Astronomy Backend Manual
The Effelsberg Direct Digitisation (EDD) backend is a modular framework for constructing real-time radio astronomy backends on commodity compute, network, GPU, FPGA, and storage infrastructure. A common core supplies control, deployment, monitoring, and pipeline lifecycle management. Independently versioned plugins provide observing capabilities, and site repositories map those capabilities onto telescope hardware.
This manual is intended for observers, telescope operators, site administrators, and pipeline developers. It describes the development version of EDD and was last verified on 2026-07-23. Production sites must record the exact core, plugin, and site-repository versions used for a deployment.