PSRDADA: Distributed Acquisition and Data Analysis for Radio Astronomy

PSRDADA supports the development of distributed data acquisition and analysis systems; it provides a flexible and well-managed ring buffer in shared memory with a variety of applications for piping data from device to ring buffer and from ring buffer to device. PSRDADA allows more than one data set to be queued in the ring buffer at one time, and data may be recorded in selected bursts using data validity flags. A variety of clients have been implemented that can write data to the ring buffer and read data from it. The primary write clients can be controlled via a simple, text-based socket interface, and read client software exists for writing data to an array of disks, sending data to an array of nodes, or processing the data directly from RAM. At the highest level of control and configuration, scripts launch the PSRDADA configuration across all nodes in the cluster, monitor all relevant processes, configure and control through a web-based interface, interface with observatory scheduling tools, and manage the ownership and archival of project data. It has been used in the implementation of baseband recording and processing instrumentation for radio pulsar astronomy.