BLADE

A GPU-accelerated radio astronomy DSP plugin for CyberEther.

The BLADE plugin (Breakthrough Listen Accelerated DSP Engine) is part of the stelline.space stack. It provides the signal-processing blocks of a radio telescope backend: channelization, beamforming, correlation, phasor generation, polarization conversion, detection, integration, and stacking. Every block has a native CPU implementation. CUDA implementations are included when the CUDA toolkit is available and compile their kernels just in time for the tensor shapes flowing through the pipeline. The blocks were born as the beamforming engine of the Allen Telescope Array and are used in production there.

Documentation

The full documentation lives at stelline.space/docs. It includes a reference page for every block: the Channelizer, the Beamformer, the Phasor, the Correlator, the Polarizer, the Detector, the Integrator, and the Stacker.

Example Flowgraphs

The examples/ directory contains complete pipelines that are also bundled into the plugin package:

• Phasor generation from telescope metadata (blade_phasor.yml).
• Stacking and integration of a generated signal (blade_stacker_integrator.yml).

Building

The plugin builds with Meson and bundles its package as a CEP:

meson setup build
meson compile -C build blade_cep

The same artifact is produced by the container image: docker build --target artifact --output .dist .

License

The BLADE plugin is distributed under the MIT License. See LICENSE.

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