RADIO ASTRONOMY
SKARAB
The SKARAB is an extremely scalable, energy-efficient 1U 19” rack mount network-attached FPGA computing platform. The heart of the platform is a motherboard featuring a Xilinx Virtex 7 (XC7VX690T-2-FFG1927) FPGA that provides unparalleled I/O bandwidth (1.28 Tera-bits per second total bandwidth) to four high performance mezzanine sites.
The FPGA features dedicated supervisory and diagnostic interfaces (1 Gb Ethernet and USB), allowing highly scalable platform management (large scale cluster reconfiguration and health/status monitoring).
An advanced reconfiguration interface allows sub-second on-the-fly reconfiguration of the Virtex 7 FPGA over 1Gb Ethernet, enabling compute clusters to rapidly change function with minimal down-time.
Four symmetrical mezzanine sites provide flexibility in optimal balancing of digital or analog I/O and local (cache) memories:
- A 4 x 40 Gb Ethernet mezzanine option supports high bandwidth, low latency Ethernet interfaces directly from the FPGA.
- A high performance memory mezzanine option featuring next-generation Micron Hybrid Memory Cube (HMC) technology, provides extremely high bandwidth, high capacity local cache memory.
- A four-channel, 14 bit, 3 GSPS ADC mezzanine with built-in digital down-conversion, capable of digitizing up to 1.5 GHz of bandwidth positioned from near-DC to 3.2 GHz.
- A 5th COM Express-compatible mezzanine site supports high-performance management processor sub-system (e.g. 4-core Intel Atom/NVidia Tegra K1.)
- A rich board support package is available to allow users to take full advantage of the platform’s features and allow rapid customization to a specific application.
STORAGE PODS
The SP4000 range of high performance, network-centric HDD and SSD managed storage solutions provides unprecedented scalability and performance for high end data storage and buffering tasks.
The SP4000C is a compact 4U 19” rack-mountable 48-bay managed storage solution, with 2.5” hot-swap drive support. It is intended for high bandwidth networked storage or buffering applications. It supports a wide range of 2.5” SATA HDDs and SSDs. The primary data interface is 40 Gb Ethernet, with a total SSD storage capacity of up to 96 TB per unit. Up to 16 secondary SAS interfaces allow the unit to directly manage archival storage (e.g. tape drive arrays) or additional SAS JBODs.
The SP4000L is a 4U, 19” rack-mountable top-loading 48-bay managed storage solution. It is intended for high capacity storage clusters, where it achieves a remarkable storage-capacity-to-cost-ratio using high capacity 3.5” SATA HDDs. Data interfacing is achieved through 10 Gb Ethernet interfaces, with a total storage capacity of up to 384 TB per unit (using 8TB HDDs).
The SP4000 series is the ideal hardware platform on which to implement high performance/high redundancy RAID arrays, as well as scalable network-centric object stores (e.g. CEPH Object Store Daemons), for data-centric compute.
MEERKAT L-BAND DIGITISER ENCLOSURE
Peralex conceptualised and manufactured functional prototypes of the chassis that houses the Meerkat Digitiser digital radio receiver in a harsh desert environment on top of the antenna pedestal.
The enclosure is capable of maintaining unprecedented levels of radio frequency shielding necessary to ensure the sensitivity of the SKA-SA Meerkat Radio Telescope.
