Stelline
Connect CyberEther to a radio telescope's network and record its data in standard radio astronomy formats.
Provides blocks
Overview
A radio telescope's digital backend is mostly a problem of moving data fast enough. The digitized antenna voltages arrive as network packets, and copying each packet through the host CPU on the way to a GPU, and again on the way to disk, quickly becomes the bottleneck.[1]
Stelline is the CyberEther plugin that removes those copies. It captures voltage packets from the network card directly into GPU memory with RDMA and writes finished data products to NVMe drives with GPUDirect Storage, which moves data between GPU memory and storage without a bounce buffer in host memory.[2] It also mirrors the telescope's metadata service into the flowgraph, so UVH5 recordings carry the observation's metadata. The blocks currently target the Allen Telescope Array.[3]
| Block | What it does |
|---|---|
| ATA Receiver | Receives ATA voltage packets into GPU buffers and assembles them into tensors. |
| UVH5 Writer | Writes correlated visibilities to UVH5, an HDF5 format for interferometric data,[4] with GPUDirect Storage. |
| UVH5 Reader | Reads a UVH5 file back into the flowgraph. |
| FBH5 Writer | Writes filterbank spectra to FBH5, the HDF5 layout of Breakthrough Listen's archive,[5] with GPUDirect Storage. |
| FBH5 Reader | Reads the data of an FBH5 file back into the flowgraph. |
| Nexus Bridge | Streams telescope metadata from the Nexus service into the flowgraph environment. |
Documentation
The Stelline documentation has a reference page for each block and covers installation and host setup. Live capture needs an NVIDIA ConnectX network card, the writers need the GPUDirect Storage stack, and the Nexus Bridge needs credentials for the Nexus service. The host dependencies and system configuration pages walk through setting them up. The BLADE plugin supplies the channelizer, beamformer, and correlator that sit between Stelline's receiver and writers.
The plugin ships as a bundle built for each CyberEther release, so download the one that matches your version. Installing plugins covers loading it.
References
References
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L. Cruz et al., Stelline, GitHub. github.com/luigifcruz/stelline ↩
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NVIDIA, "GPUDirect Storage overview guide," NVIDIA Documentation. ↩
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J. Welch et al., "The Allen Telescope Array: The first widefield, panchromatic, snapshot radio camera for radio astronomy and SETI," Proc. IEEE, vol. 97, no. 8, pp. 1438-1447, Aug. 2009, doi:10.1109/JPROC.2009.2017103, arXiv:0904.0762. ↩
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G. K. Keating et al., "pyuvdata v3: An interface for astronomical interferometric data sets in Python," J. Open Source Softw., vol. 10, no. 109, art. no. 7482, May 2025, doi:10.21105/joss.07482. ↩
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M. Lebofsky et al., "The Breakthrough Listen search for intelligent life: Public data, formats, reduction, and archiving," Publ. Astron. Soc. Pac., vol. 131, no. 1006, art. no. 124505, Dec. 2019, doi:10.1088/1538-3873/ab3e82, arXiv:1906.07391. ↩