Digital Instrumentation for the Research Community: The Next Generation of CASPER

研究界数字仪器：下一代 CASPER

• 批准号: 2009537
• 负责人: Dan Werthimer
• 金额: $ 101.77万
• 依托单位: University of California-Berkeley
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2020
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2020-09-01 至 2024-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2009537&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Digital; Instrumentation; Research; Community; Next

This project, led by astronomers at the University of California – Berkeley, involves an international community of astronomers, physicists, engineers, and computer scientists working together to develop high performance digital instrumentation for radio astronomy research. The collaboration develops open source hardware, software, libraries, tools, and instrument designs, enabling researchers to implement the instrumentation needed to achieve their science goals in a cost effective and timely manner. These products provide support for developments in radio astronomy ranging from small experiments in undergraduate teaching labs to telescopes at the frontier of astronomy research such as the Event Horizon Telescope. The instrumentation provided by this collaboration is also used in brain research, genomics, radar applications, and neutron and magnetic field imaging.Research from the Collaboration for Astronomy Signal Processing and Electronics Research (CASPER) has revolutionized the cost and time scale for development of radio astronomy signal processing instrumentation. Over a thousand CASPER-designed Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) platforms have been deployed in roughly one hundred instruments around the world. CASPER infrastructure has supported a range of cutting edge radio astronomy programs such as; detecting the Epoch of Reionization (learning how the first stars and galaxies formed), NANOGrav (utilizing pulsars as gravitational wave detectors), and the Event Horizon Telescope (imaging the black hole at the center of our galaxy). CASPER owes its success to its software tools and libraries, which were designed with the goal of streamlining instrument development, and lowering the barriers of entry to new instrument designers. This proposal will leverage this past work of the CASPER community, in tandem with the current developments in the super-computing industry, to provide the infrastructure to cost effectively build the next generation of astronomical instrumentation.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

该项目由加州大学伯克利分校的天文学家领导，国际天文学家、物理学家、工程师和计算机科学家共同努力开发用于射电天文学研究的高性能数字仪器。库、工具和仪器设计，使研究人员能够以经济高效且及时的方式实施实现其科学目标所需的仪器。这些产品为射电天文学的发展提供支持，从本科教学实验室的小型实验到望远镜。该合作提供的仪器也用于脑研究、基因组学、雷达应用以及中子和磁场成像。天文学信号处理和电子研究合作组织的研究（ CASPER）彻底改变了射电天文信号处理仪器开发的成本和时间尺度，超过一千个 CASPER 设计的现场可编程门阵列 (FPGA) 平台已部署在大约一百台仪器中。 CASPER 基础设施支持了一系列尖端射电天文学项目，例如探测再电离时代（了解第一批恒星和星系的形成方式）、NANOGrav（利用脉冲星作为引力波探测器）和事件视界望远镜（ CASPER 的成功归功于其软件工具和库，这些工具和库的设计目标是简化仪器开发并降低障碍。该提案将利用 CASPER 社区过去的工作，结合超级计算行业的当前发展，提供基础设施，以经济高效地构建下一代天文仪器。该奖项是 NSF 的法定奖项使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。