Abstract

The Ooty Wide Field Array (OWFA) is a modern transformation of the mature Ooty Radio Telescope into a programmable synthesis telescope equivalent to a uniformly spaced linear array of 264 antenna elements each of size 1.92m  30m, operating in a 38 MHz frequency band centred at 326.5 MHZ. The digitized response of each of the 264 elements is transported using a newly established fibre optic network to a central data partitioning hardware which distributes the data to realize a high degree of load balancing for a software correlator planned on an 8-node HPC. The 264-antenna real-time software correlator will provide 800 spectral channels with a spectral resolution of about 48 kHz. The required real time compute throughput of the OWFA correlator will exceed that of the present GMRT software correlator by more about a factor of 15. The OWFA is the first signficant application of the Networked Signal Processing System(NSPS) recently proposed for multi-element radio telescopes. With such a configuration, the OWFA will be a powerful platform for studying HI mass fluctuations at redshifts ~ 3:3 as well as a variety of large scale surveys with goals ranging from space weather watch to transients searches.