Final acceptance of the ALMA correlator
The final acceptance of the ALMA correlator, developed and built at the CDL, occurred on December 20, 2012. The ALMA correlator's 134 million processors will continually combine and compare the signals from the 50 antennas in the main ALMA array plus up to 14 of the 16 antennas in the Atacama Compact Array (ACA), for a total of 64 antennas. At the correlator's maximum capacity of 64 antennas, there are 2,016 antenna pair combinations, and as many as 17 quadrillion calculations every second. The correlator is housed in the ALMA Array Operations Site (AOS) Technical Building, the highest-altitude high-tech building in the world.
