Exactly. It's Not Just One PC in the Corner, Right?

The current generation and correlator uses an FPGA based computing platform. We call it Scarab, there's a bit of a tradition to name radio astronomy compute things after insects. In our data center in South Africa, we've got about 280 of these individual Scarabs. And each of them has a role to play in the signal processing pipeline. They talk to each other via Ethernet and they're controlled by a central master controller computer that runs Python. The processing parameters need to be updated from time to time. So for example, as the earth turns, the geometric delay between a given pair of telescopes will change slightly. That gets updated periodically in the Scarab so that it can carry