High-Performance Computing for SKA Transient Search: Use of FPGA based Accelerators -- a brief review

TL;DR

This paper reviews the use of FPGA-based accelerators in high-performance computing for real-time pulsar and transient searches in the SKA, highlighting architecture, efficiency, and future prospects.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of FPGA architectures and their critical role in enabling high-performance, real-time data processing for SKA's large-scale radio telescope data.

Findings

FPGA accelerators significantly improve processing speed for SKA data.

Real-time pipelines benefit from FPGA's power-performance efficiency.

Future opportunities include advanced FPGA architectures for even larger data volumes.

Abstract

This paper presents the High-Performance computing efforts with FPGA for the accelerated pulsar/transient search for the SKA. Case studies are presented from within SKA and pathfinder telescopes highlighting future opportunities. It reviews the scenario that has shifted from offline processing of the radio telescope data to digitizing several hundreds/thousands of antenna outputs over huge bandwidths, forming several 100s of beams, and processing the data in the SKA real-time pulsar search pipelines. A brief account of the different architectures of the accelerators, primarily the new generation Field Programmable Gate Array-based accelerators, showing their critical roles to achieve high-performance computing and in handling the enormous data volume problems of the SKA is presented here. It also presents the power-performance efficiency of this emerging technology and presents potential future scenarios.