1. 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.

2. 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?!

3. 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