Alessio Sclocco

I am really glad to be able to publish this paper.
We wrote it during the Summer of 2011 and it will be presented the 24th of May 2012 in Shangai at the International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS). It is based on the job I did for my master’s degree thesis. In a while we will publish also the source code :)

Radio Astronomy Beam Forming on Many-Core Architectures
Accepted for publication in 26th IEEE International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS) May 21-25, 2012, Shanghai, China.
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Friday the 2nd of December 2011, the computer science departments of the VU and the UvA celebrated the 30th anniversary of the teaching of computer science in Amsterdam.

On the right you can see the poster my group realized for the event. Kind of an hint about what we (that means also me) are working on :)
Sorry for the quality of the image but the light was quite bad for taking pictures with a mobile phone there.

I find this research topic really interesting, and it allows me to combine my interest in computer science with the general passion for science. Anyway, I hope to be able to post part of our work at some point, i.e. when we will have some paper ready. All the source code of my work is licensed under the GPL so it also will be available at some point in the future (I am being vague, I know, but it has to reach a certain maturity before being published).

I am finally publishing my master’s degree thesis, whose title is “Radio astronomy beam forming on GPUs“, on this website. The thesis describes all the work I did on the LOFAR beam former and is one of the starting points of the work I am currently doing at the VU (more on this in the future).

The thesis can be downloaded here in pdf format. I want to thank my supervisors for the great work they did helping me in this project. All the mistakes and errors are, of course, mine.

The title of my master project, and my thesis, is “Radio astronomy beam forming on GPUs“. I presented the results in a public session at the VU Amsterdam the 13th of December, just few days ago, and it is time now to share the slides of the presentation here also.

Radio astronomy beam forming on GPUs (presentation) (pdf).

In few months the final version of the thesis, and hopefully also the whole source code.

In September I was porting to OpenCL a version of the radioastronomy beam forming algorithm I realized in CUDA for my master project. The algorithm needs to clean the memory after some iterations, and with CUDA I was using the memset function to do it. Unluckily, OpenCL does not provide a function like memset, so I had to write a kernel to accomplish the task.

Now, it is clear that writing a kernel like this is one of the easiest tasks ever :), and is a one-liner BTW, but as always I’d like to share the code with the Internet, cause it’s always useful to find some example code on-line, especially when you are in a hurry.

__kernel void memSet(float value, __global float *mem) {
    mem[get_global_id(0)] = value;
}

As can be seen, the memory to clean was an array of float values, but changing it to work with other data types is trivial.