A Decade of Developing Radio-Astronomy Instrumentation using CASPER Open-Source Technology

TL;DR

This paper reviews a decade of CASPER's open-source radio-astronomy instrumentation, highlighting its widespread adoption, ongoing software development, and efforts to enhance hardware compatibility and programming support.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive catalog of CASPER's current tools and instruments, and discusses future directions for software and hardware support.

Findings

CASPER technology powers over 45 scientific instruments worldwide.

CASPER's open-source tools are used by dozens of academic institutions.

Ongoing software development aims to support more programming environments and hardware.

Abstract

The Collaboration for Astronomy Signal Processing and Electronics Research (CASPER) has been working for a decade to reduce the time and cost of designing, building and deploying new digital radio-astronomy instruments. Today, CASPER open-source technology powers over 45 scientific instruments worldwide, and is used by scientists and engineers at dozens of academic institutions. In this paper we catalog the current offerings of the CASPER collaboration, and instruments past and present built by CASPER users and developers. We describe the ongoing state of software development, as CASPER looks to support a broader range of programming environments and hardware and ensure compatibility with the latest vendor tools.