dadafilterbank

Connect to a PSRdada ringbuffer and write out the data in filterbank format.

This program is part of the data handling pipeline for the AA-ALERT project. See dadatrigger for an introduction and dataflow schema.

Installation

Requirements:

Cmake
Psrdada

Note that psrdada could add an additional dependency on CUDA.

Instructions:

$ mkdir build && cd build
$ cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=release
$ make
$ make install

Usage

 $ dadafilterbank -k <hexadecimal key> -l <logfile> -n <filename prefix for dumps>

Command line arguments:

-k Set the (hexadecimal) key to connect to the ringbuffer.
-l Absolute path to a logfile (to be overwritten)
-n Prefix for the fitlerbank output files

Modes of operation

Science modes

The program implements different modes:

mode 0: Stokes I + TAB (multiple beams)
mode 2: Stokes I + IAB (coherent beams, so only one tied array beam)

Not supported modes:

mode 1: Stokes IQUV + TAB
mode 3: Stokes IQUV + IAB

Science cases

The data rate is set per science case. Supported cases:

case 3: 12500 samples per second, 9 beams.
case 4: 12500 samples per second, 12 beams.

The ringbuffer

Header block

Metadata is read from the PSRdada header block. Note that some of the metadata available in the header block is ignored, due to code constraints and optimizations. For values that should be present see the table below.

header key	type	units	description
MIN_FREQUENCY	double	MHz	Center of lowest frequency band
BW	double	MHz	Total bandwidth of the observation
RA	double	hhmmss.s	Right ascension
DEC	double	ddmmss.s	Declination
SOURCE	string	text	Source name
AZ_START	double	degrees	Azimuth angle of telescope
ZA_START	double	degrees	Zenith angle of telescope
MJD_START	double	days since epoch	Modified Julian Date
PADDED_SIZE	int	bytes	Length of the fastest dimension of the data array
SCIENCE_CASE	int	1	Mode of operation of ARTS, determines data rate
SCIENCE_MODE	int	1	Mode of operation of ARTS, determines data layout

Data block

A ringbuffer page is interpreted as an array of Stokes I: [NTABS, NCHANNELS, padded_size] Array padding along the fastest dimension is implemented to facilitate memory copies.

Filterbank output files

Tied array beams are written to separate files, one per observation. Note that these files can become very big.

Filterbank file names are derived from the file name prefix (-n option).

For science mode 0, .fil is appended, resulting in prefix.fil
For science mode 2, both tied array beam number and .fil is appended, resulting in prefix_NN.fil.

To prevent issues with relative paths etc., please use fully resolved absolute paths (starting with a '/').

Performance

Altough the program is relatively simple, the large arrays can cause performance issues wrt. caching. The matrix transpose and inversion of the channel dimension takes longer than realtime using a naive implementation on the ARTS cluster.

In the tune subdirectory there are several implementations trying out different loop order and various levels of loop unrolling. It also adds openMP, with the number of threads specified in the Makefile. As a final step, you should pin the executable to a specific core using taskset.

To try them run:

  cd tune
  make all
  make time

For science case 4 on the ARTS cluster, the loopct_r6 implementation was fastest (using 2 to 4 threads); this is current implementation.

Contributers

Jisk Attema, Netherlands eScience Center
Leon Oostrum, UvA
Gijs Molenaar, Pythonic.nl

NOTES

maximum length of source_name is currently 255 characters. Longer names will result in undefined behaviour in dada functions.
The number of frequency channels is hardcoded to 1536, the number of bits to 8.

TRASAL / dadafilterbank

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