May 25, 2021
The National Science Foundation (NSF) recently awarded The University of New Mexico a three-year, $500,000 grant to develop software that utilizes Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) to capture and process data from astronomical telescopes.
GPUs render the beautiful graphic displays in games found on modern computers, including cell phones and tablets. The software, known as Bifrost, provides a collection of software building blocks that can be put together to process streams of data in a highly parallel fashion. For example, Bifrost is currently in use at the Long Wavelength Array (LWA). The LWA is a radio telescope for exploration of a broad scientific portfolio ranging from the study of Cosmic Dawn, when the stars and galaxies lit up the universe, to understanding the properties of the Earth’s ionosphere.