Engineering topics

Amagai, Jun

Publications and source records attributed to Amagai, Jun.

3 records

NASA NTRS2010

GPU Based Software Correlators - Perspectives for VLBI2010

Caused by historical separation and driven by the requirements of the PC gaming industry, Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) have evolved to massive parallel processing systems which entered the area of non-graphic related applications. Although a single processing core on the GPU is much slower and provides less functionality than its counterpart on the CPU, the huge number of these small processing entities outperforms the classical processors when the application can be parallelized. Thus, in recent years various radio astronomical projects have started to make use of this technology either to realize the correlator on this platform or to establish the post-processing pipeline with GPUs. Therefore, the feasibility of GPUs as a choice for a VLBI correlator is being investigated, including pros and cons of this technology. Additionally, a GPU based software correlator will be reviewed with respect to energy consumption/GFlop/sec and cost/GFlop/sec.

Hobiger, Thomas↗

NASA NTRS2010

The First Experiment with VLBI-GPS Hybrid System

In this paper, we introduce our GPS-VLBI hybrid system and show the results of the first experiment which is now under way. In this hybrid system, GPS signals are captured by a normal GPS antenna, down-converted to IF signals, and then sampled by the VLBI sampler VSSP32 developed by NICT. The sampled GPS data are recorded and correlated in the same way as VLBI observation data. The correlator outputs are the group delay and the delay rate. Since the whole system uses the same frequency standard, many sources of systematic errors are common between the VLBI system and the GPS system. In this hybrid system, the GPS antenna can be regarded as an additional VLBI antenna having multiple beams towards GPS satellites. Therefore, we expect that this approach will provide enough data to improve zenith delay estimates and geodetic results.

Kwak, Younghee↗

NASA NTRS1990

A highly stable crystal oscillator applied to geodetic VLBI experiment

Instead of a hydrogen maser, a carefully selected Crystal oscillator which is phase locked to a Cesium (Cs) frequency standard of a geodetic VLBI experiment. The domestic VLBI experiment with 55 km baseline using the Crystal oscillator at one end was made in Japan and the obtained error of the baseline vector components were 4 cm, and that of the baseline length was 3 cm. This system may be operated after only 2 hours warm up. These results coincides with those of conventional geodetic Laser ranging and VLBI using a hydrogen maser within the formal error. A VLBI experiment with over 1000 km baselines were carried out successfully from October 1988, and over 11000 km baseline between Japan and Antarctica was carried out successfully in January 1990.

Kiuchi, Hitoshi↗