JIVE Establishment
The Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe was formally established in 1993 by the European Consortium for VLBI. Information about the last JIVE Board of Directors is available here.
Construction of the Correlator
The construction of the EVN MkIV VLBI data processor was an international, collaborative project, involving the EVN Consortium and various other partners (NASA GSFC, USNO, Smithsonian CfA, and IfAG supported work at the MIT Haystack Observatory). Together these institutes formed the International Advanced Correlator Consortium (IACC).
- Fall 1992: Design started
- June 9, 1993: Official inauguration of JIVE
- March 1995: First hardware arrived
- November 1996: Correlator Room ready
- 21 July 1997: First fringes
- 22 October 1998: Official opening of the correlator
From tape to disk to fiber
Regular operations started after a commissioning period of a year, but it was actually the start of an ongoing evolution. Since then, almost every component has been upgraded or replaced several times, and so have the operational tools and practices. Most importantly, the tape units were gradually replaced by disk systems, and fiber connections started to replace the shipping of disks: e-VLBI.
- 7 April 1999: First Image, later improved
- 6 August 1999: Second image
- January 2000: First science
- June 2003: First image with Mark5 disk systems
- January 2004: First e-VLBI EVN image
- April 28, 2004: First real-time e-VLBI image; 3 EVN telescopes at 32 Mb/s
- December 2004: EVN completely disk-based; tapes still used for globals
- February 2, 2007: e-VLBI image with 5 EVN telescopes at 512 Mb/s
- Jan 16, 2009: marathon global e-VLBI observation (17 telescopes, 33 hours)
- May 2010: e-EVN recognized as a SKA pathfinder
Upgrading the correlator
In recent years, JIVE's R&D group has focused on replacing the MkIV hardware correlator with the SFXC software correlator. We have also collaborated with ASTRON to design and produce UniBoard, a generic FPGA based, multifunctional data processing board, which JIVE uses for correlation.
- May/June 2010: first user experiment with SFXC software correlator
- November 2010: first user experiment with SFXC and pulsar binning/gating
- March 2011: production of UniBoard generic digital processing board begins
- May 2011: multiple phase centers using SFXC
- August 2011: first real-time e-VLBI fringes with SFXC
- May/June 2012: first EVN session completely with SFXC
- June 20, 2012: demo of 4-Gbps recording at station while simultaneously streaming 1, 2 and 4-Gbps to JIVE for real-time correlation
- June 2012: UniBoard VLBI correlator produces first fringes
- December 2012: first e-VLBI session with SFXC
- January 16, 2013: successful test of mixed 1 - 2 Gbps observing