Introduction

Modern radio receivers digitize increasingly wide bandwidths close to the receiver and deliver high-rate packet streams to downstream compute systems. EDD provides a reusable software framework for turning heterogeneous commercial compute, GPU, FPGA, network, and storage hardware into a coherent radio astronomy backend.

EDD is not a single signal-processing application. It is an orchestration and integration framework in which independently deployable pipelines are connected to form observing modes. The same core can support spectroscopy, spectropolarimetry, pulsar timing and searching, baseband recording, VLBI, correlation, beamforming, and data-format writers.

Design goals

Modularity

Processing capabilities are supplied by plugins rather than built into the core. A site installs only the plugins it needs.

Portability

Site-specific hosts, networks, storage, hardware, and telescope interfaces live in a site repository. The same pipeline code can therefore be deployed at different observatories.

Reproducibility

Inventories, playbooks, provision descriptions, plugin versions, Debian packages, and container images make the deployed system configuration explicit and versionable.

Operational consistency

Every pipeline follows the same KATCP state model and exposes common status sensors. Operators can control and monitor heterogeneous processing components through one Master Controller.

Composability

Pipelines declare input and output data streams. The Master Controller resolves their connections into a dependency graph, allowing one stream to feed multiple commensal processing paths.

Where to continue