Radio Interferometric Imaging in the Petascale Era: New Opportunties and Challenges

Athol Kemball, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Usage Details

This project concerns the use of Blue Waters to address petascale problems in radio-interferometric image formation that are relevant to future large astronomical telescopes, such as the Square Kilometer Array (SKA). Radio-interferometric calibration and imaging, by its nature as an ill-posed inverse problem that is not analytically tractable, does not permit a solution that routinely includes an estimate of uncertainty or fidelity. In prior work, we have demonstrated a novel solution to the problem of pixel-level uncertainty quantification in radio-interferometric imaging using contemporary statistical resampling methods on modern HPC systems and have developed an associated software framework implementing these methods. Through this project we will deploy and optimize this framework for Blue Waters and ensure that it is fully scalable and efficient for key challenge problems in radio-interferometric imaging at extreme scale.