Architecture and implementation of a 25000 FPS radio camera on the long wavelength array

A highly optimized E-field Parallel Imaging Correlator (EPIC), currently under commissioning on the Long Wavelength Array in Sevilleta, New Mexico, can image the sky at a rate of 25,000 FPS per polarization and frequency. The system consists of six processing nodes, each producing images of the visible sky with a 1-degree spatial resolution at an 80 ms temporal resolution, covering a 3.2 MHz spectral window below 100 MHz, yielding a total bandwidth of 19.2 MHz. Light curves for selected sources of interest will be extracted from each image into a distributed database, and 5-minute accumulations are archived on the disk for further analysis. In this paper, we describe the components of our real-time imaging system, designed as a plug-and-play solution to deploy EPIC on similar arrays with only minor modifications.