from:	Young, Ken 
to:	Mark Gurwell ,
Qizhou Zhang ,
Glen Petitpas ,
Chunhua Qi ,
David Wilner ,
Jun-Hui Zhao ,
Nimesh Patel ,
Eric Keto ,
Jonathan Weintroub 
date:	Mon, Aug 3, 2015 at 8:40 AM
subject:	Next Quadrant of SWARM


Dear SMA Data Enthusiast,

   We will probably have the next quadrant of SWARM available before the end, and perhaps before the beginning of the next SMA semester.   As I understand it, that quadrant of SWARM will process the 4->6 GHz portion of the IF - the portion of the IF now processed by the ASIC correlator.   Several questions come to mind:

1) When the next quadrant of SWARM is running, at at least 10/11 speed, do we want to keep the ASIC correlator running?   We are offering the ASIC correlator in the Call for Proposals, but it is possible that nobody will request a higher spectral resolution than SWARM provides.   If that is the case, should we just retire the ASIC?   I know that there are special situations where the ASIC could add additional bandwidth even with two SWARM quadrants (dual receiver observations).   Is that reason enough to keep the ASIC running?

2) Assuming that we keep the ASIC running, should I just make the two new SWARM chunks s51 and s52?

3) Are our data reduction packages up to the task of processing ~80 GByte data files?   If not, what needs to be done to make them ready?   Should I produce some simulated two quadrant SWARM + ASIC data files, to see if we can handle them?

Thanks,

Taco