WIDAR Under Construction
As part of the decade-long upgrade to the Very Large Array, an enormous room inside the Control Building was shielded in copper and given a raised floor to begin installation of the VLA’s new supercomputer known as WIDAR (Wideband Interferometric Digital ARchitecture). It is a method for digital correlation of very wideband signals from a radio interferometer. Data are digitally filtered and tuned down by ten percent into lower rate sub-bands which are separately cross-correlated and integrated before being seamlessly stitched together to yield the final wideband spectrum.
Credit: J. Stanley, NRAO/AUI/NSF
