Andrew Woods

B.Sc. (Electrical and Computer Engineering) (First Class Hons.), UCT

Biography
I was a student at the University of Cape Town (UCT) completing my MSc degree in Electrical Engineering supervised under Prof. Mike Inggs. My MSc was involved with the Karoo Array Telescope (KAT) Project and was doing my research at the SKA/KAT offices in Pinelands, Cape Town and at the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC). more

Undergraduate Thesis (2006) :

An FX Software Correlator for the Karoo Array Telescope Project
My undergraduate thesis involved work for the KAT project and describes the relevant electrical engineering issues involved with designing and implementing a radio astronomy FX software correlator. Download Thesis (2.3 Mb)

Masters Thesis (2007-2010):

Accelerating Software Radio Astronomy FX Correlation with GPU and FPGA Co-processors

This thesis attempts to accelerate compute intensive sections of a frequency domain radio astronomy correlator using dedicated co-processors. Two co-processor implementations were made independently with one using reconfigurable hardware (Xilinx Virtex 4LX100) and the other uses a graphics processor( Nvidia 9800GT). The objective of a radioastronomy correlator is to compute the complex valued correlation products for each baseline which can be used to reconstruct the sky's radio brightness distribution. Radio astronomy correlators have huge computation demands and this dissertation focuses on the computational aspects of correlation, concentrating on the X-engine stage of the correlator. Click for more detail

Contact Details

Andrew Woods
SKA/KAT
Lonsdale Building
Lonsdale Road
Pinelands
7405
South Africa
Email: drew.woods@gmail.com