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© (c) Astron 2014
Cobalt is the digital backend that replaced LOFAR's IBM BlueGene/P supercomputer (the big black thing on the right) at the 24th of April 2014. The 9-PC computer cluster -- 8 active servers and one spare, all sporting bright blue lights -- performs most calculations on NVIDIA K10 graphics processing units (GPUs).
About a year ago, we produced the first interferometric map of the Sun and Taurus A (top left) from a tiny amount of pre-recorded data, using off-line correlations. Now we can correlate 96 MHz of bandwidth from all 70 stations (antenna fields) that are currently part of the International LOFAR Telescope (ILT). What's more, we can do it in real time (top right), with capacity to spare!
The full core beamformer is almost as feature-complete as the BG/P beamformer was, and can detect faint millisecond pulsar signals in only a few minutes of data (bottom). Cobalt's main development effort has ended now, and it has become part of regular LOFAR operations, maintenance, and development. We look forward to many Petabytes of great quality data!
