End-To-End Modelling Of The Imaging Pipeline In Radio Astronomy

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) will push the boundaries of radio astronomy. As such, it will need enormous computing power to process the tremendous amount of data it will produce. Significant savings in computing could be made if some of this processing was done in single-precision. This paper presents our end-to-end modelling of the SKA Imaging Pipeline. We model the signals received by the Central Signal Processor (CSP) using our Sky Generator Model. We then process the sky signals with our CSP Correlator Model to generate the visibilities that are passed to the Science Data Processor (SDP). These visibilities are gridded Fourier transformed by our SDP Imaging Model to produce a dirty image. This dirty image is then deconvolved to produce an image of the sky. Through our models we investigate the error introduced with reduced numerical precision, and we perform various tests to explore the limits of single-precision processing.