Solar Images Processing in Parallel Environment

Resumo

This paper presents the PVA-BDA project (Processing, Visualization and Analysis in Parallel
Environment of the BDA Data) that has been developed for processing of solar images that will be captured by
the BDA (Brazilian Decimetric Array), a radio telescope under development at the National Institute for Space
Research (INPE). In a joint effort between the Department of Computer Science at Federal University of São
Carlos (DC/UFSCar), the Astrophysics Division (DAS) and Associated Laboratory for Computing and Applied
Mathematics (LAC) at INPE, a high performance parallel system is being developed with capacity to support
realistic applications, involving a reasonable amount of parallel processing, in order to carry out the processing,
visualization and analysis of solar images captured by BDA, in real time. The aim is to create the conditions for
starting a study of the solar weather forecast. The forecast of solar explosions are important as they may cause
serious perturbations in terrestrial communication systems. An application for 3D reconstruction of X-ray
tomographic images of the solar atmosphere was developed at DC/UFSCar. Due to the need for the 3D
reconstruction of solar magnetic structures, in real-time, this application was implemented to execute in a parallel
machine using DSPs.