CONTROL AND TEST SOFTWARE FOR IRAM WIDEX CORRELATOR

IRAM 1 is an international research institute for radio astronomy. It has designed a new correlator called WideX for the Plateau de Bure interferometer (an array of six 15meter telescopes) in the French Alps. The device started its official service in February 2010. This correlator must be driven in real-time at 32 Hz for sending parameters and for data acquisition. With 3.67 million channels, distributed over 1792 dedicated chips, that produce a 1.87 Gbits/sec data output rate, the data acquisition and processing and also the automatic hardware-failure detection are big challenges for the software. This article presents the software that has been developed to drive and test the correlator. In particular it presents an innovative usage of a highspeed optical link, initially developed for the CERN ALICE experiment, associated with real-time Linux (RTAI) to achieve our goals.