High-Performance Pipeline Processing for ASKAP

The Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP, [1]) is a radio-synthesis telescope located at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO) in Western Australia, featuring thirty-six 12m dishes equipped with Phased- Array-Feed (PAF) receivers. These provide a wide, 30 square degree instantaneous field-of-view by forming up to 36 separate dual-polarisation beams at once. This results in a high data rate: 70 TB of correlated visibilities in an 8 hour observation, requiring high-performance calibration & imaging pipelines. The ASKAPsoft package has been developed specifically for meeting this challenging problem. Particular design decisions in the imaging algorithms, and the framework under which they run, have been made to meet processing requirements on memory and run-time, and scientific requirements.