CASPER Workshop

We would like to thank both those who prepared and ran the workshop and those who attended. We had a full house that included visitors from as near as Berkeley and as far as India and South Africa! We hope that the attendees will take from the workshop not just the knowledge they've gained of the CASPER tools, but also the collaborative spirit that helped make the workshop a success.

For those who were unable to attend for any reason or would like to reference parts of the workshop, we recorded most of the presentations. Below is a summary of the workshop with links to the recorded presentations. These presentations can also be found in the Documenation section of the website.

Workshop Summary

Monday, June 25
----------------

 9:00  caffeine

 9:30  welcome - don backer

 9:35  introductions - don, mel, dan, participants

 9:45  overview - dan werthimer

10:45  break, and tour of bwrc lab

11:15  simulink and system generator simulation environment
            - aaron parsons

12:00  lunch

 1:00  dsp/radio astronomy libraries - aaron parsons

      (fft, polyphase filter bank, digital down converter,
      filters, reorder, noise generator...)


 2:00  infrastructure libraries - henry chen

     adc, snapshots, xaui, 10 Gbit ethernet, sram, dram
     lightweight IP - andrew
     board test suite

 3:00  break

 3:30  documentation: casper library reference manual, block descriptions, 
       reference designs, borph (linux I/O), shared memory & registers - vinayak nagpal

 4:30  tiny shell AND lightweight IP - daniel chapman, andrew siemion 

 5:00  organizing wednesday and thursday workgroups

 6:30  dinner -- pizza and beer at dan, mary kate and willy's place
         2375 cedar st, NE corner of cedar and scenic, 510-848-2179



Tuesday, June 26
-----------------

9:00 caffeine

9:30 monday summary - dan werthimer

9:30 lecture/demos on (15 minutes each):

	example reference designs:
		VLBI channelizer, seti spectrometer - henry chen
		pocket and mars spectrometer - daniel chapman
		bee3 - chen chang 
		four antenna correlator, scalable (32 antenna and beyond) 
                 packetized FX correlator - aaron parsons
 
10:45 break

11:15 pulsar machines - joeri van leeuwen
	
11:45 lunch

1:00 upcoming new hardware - dan
     (bee3, ibob2/miniroach/roach, new adc boards, receiver board)

1:30 discussion of participant projects
     (each group - max of 10 minutes each group)
	 	NRAO - john ford
	 	GMRT - yashwant gupta  
	 	GAVRT - glen jones
	 	KAT - alan langman        
	 	Arecibo - tamara hall


2:30 real-time imaging - mel wright

2:45 break

3:00 rfi and dynamic range requirements - don backer

3:15 available and upcoming hardware, where to get boards and chips - dan werthimer

4:15 workgroup planning and laboratory excercises 




Wednesday, June 27 
------------------

9:00 caffeine

9:30 start on

10:00 what software you need,  where to get it,  and how to install it - henry chen

laboratory excercises
(you build and test instruments, with guidance from casperites)

and/or:

break up into discussion/design sessions with participants
on their planned projects:

 correlator group
 beamformer group
 pulsar group
 spectrometer group
 real time imaging group (mel wright, et al)
 next generation boards
 tools and infrastructure

12h00 Lunch & campus walking tour

14h00 10 minute Report-back from groups



and Thursday June 28
----------------------

9:00 caffeine

9:30 start on

9:45 Summary of working groups

10:00 Group Photo (High res, Low res)

Hardware/software tutorials

discussion of how best to collaborate

13:30 "Under the hood" with Henry around the round table

16:00 Farewell