A Streaming Approach to Radio Astronomy Imaging

The emergence of large-field radio telescopes has generated the need to process huge amounts of data “on the fly” in order to avoid substantial costs in storage and signal processing. In this paper, we describe a streaming software approach to radio astronomy, and in particular, show how the IBM-developed stream computing architecture System S enables seamless “on the fly” radio astronomy imaging. This approach overcomes pertinent issues of memory limitation and latencies related to data processing, and it allows autonomous processor allocation to tasks as the need arises.