Radio Synthesis Imaging: A Grand Challenge HPCC Project

This paper describes the technique of radio synthesis imaging and its computational requirements. The radio synthesis imaging project at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is addressing these requirements in four areas: real-time transfer of data from remotely located telescopes to NCSA and archiving of these raw data; production of software for calibration, image formation, and image improvement on NCSA parallel processor supercomputers; development of a system for archiving of final processed images in a digital library; and production of sophisticated tools for image visualization and analysis. At Supercomputing '95 in San Diego the authors demonstrated an observation of the center of the Milky Way galaxy, data processing on the remote NCSA SGI Power Challenge Array, accessing complementary data in the NCSA Digital Image Library, and visualization of the galactic center data sets.