OSKAR station simulator Simulate a full SKA station Realistic ... Provide a flexible and extendable framework to Investigate station configurations, antennas, etc Interface to other modules and simulators (such as EM, sky, etc) for current and future projects and activities Investigate various beamforming strategies Map beamforming solution to different hardware Currently, to run on a cluster Hardware agnostic Other hardware ... These few slides are to put you up to date with the work we are doing for the OSKAR project. I’m sure a lot of this is not totally new to most people here so I’ll keep things brief and aim this as a start point for discussion and questions. As you probably already know the in the oskar project we are working on an full station SKA beamforming simulator which aims to be as realistic as possible to a SKA station. This means running beamforming algorithms on 65 thousand antenna and multiple frequency channels as well as looking at how beams can be calibrated and corrected. And the simulator will be used for investigating various station configurations, antenna, beamforming strategies etc. Clearly developing a fully realistic station simulator is a huge undertaking therefore when designing the code we aim to make everything as flexible and extendable as possible. The simulator will be running on a cluster. However we will be keeping the various beamforming schemes largely hardware agnostic so that that the beamforming module can be easily ported onto other hardware platforms.

Simulator concept diagram Front-end (GUI) Back-end Sky model Pre-channelised Generic equatorial coordinate system Beamforming schemes Hierarchical One shot Adaptive Beamforming module Portable to various hardware Plug and play design Checkpoint data at multiple levels Sky generation Corruptions Antenna signal generation Options & user inputs Weights generation Beamforming This slide describes the basic layout of the simulator. Front end (GUI) sets up options etc Back end that runs on the cluster. Each of the boxes represents modules of the code. We will have a sky module which will in the first instance exist as a point source sky model but can be extended to include more detailed models as and when needed. We have a antenna signal generation module which turns the sky into a set of antenna signals A beamforming module … Visualisation Other post processing?!

Discussion points Interface to sky model Coordinate system Extended objects Antenna EM response characteristics Cross/mutual coupling Polarisation mixing Beamforming hardware implementation Interface/API definitions Finally this slide outlines the aspects of the project in which we will are working to collaborate with other projects on. We would ultimately like to include a better sky model which can handle for example extended objects. We need to look at how to include a better treatment of the antenna EM characteristics into the beamforming We aim to be working with 2pad in particular at a hardware beamforming implementation And throughout we are very conscious of making sure out interfaces and api allow the code to be extended and to other projects