BLINK and you'll miss it: blazingly-fast all-sky radio astronomy pipelines.
In astronomy, a lot can happen in the blink of an eye. Pulsars, Gamma-Ray Bursts, and the celebrated Fast Radio Bursts have all been serendipitous discoveries facilitated by high-time resolution telescopes equipped with state-of-the-art hardware and specialised software. In recent times, radio telescope technology has advanced significantly, bringing real-time searches for new transient signals over wide fields of view within reach. However, the wide fields of view come at a prohibitive computational cost, which is only going to increase as we approach the era of the Square Kilometer Array, slated to be the most powerful radio telescope ever conceived. Making real-time, image-based transient searches feasible will require a combination of the latest data processing technology offered by modern supercomputers, and novel data processing algorithms that have been optimised for both speed and sensitivity to transient signals. In this project, we propose to bring Pawsey’s latest-generation hardware to bear on the problem, demonstrating the feasibility of such searches as applied to the Murchison Widefield Array, the foremost precursor telescope for the low-frequency component of the Square Kilometer Array.
- @marcinsokolowski
- @dipietrantonio
The PaCER program was established in late 2020 to ready the research community to achieve extreme performance on Pawsey’s next-generation supercomputer Setonix. This long-term, $1.42 million partnership between researchers and Pawsey’s supercomputing specialists provides an opportunity for researchers to become exascale-ready, working on new algorithm designs and optimising codes, workflows and data movement pipelines.
Ten successful research projects were announced in March 2021. These research teams are gaining early access to supercomputing tools and infrastructure, training and exclusive hackathons focused on HPC performance at scale. Each three-year project is supported by a Pawsey co-funded doctoral or postdoctoral position and Pawsey expertise working closely with the research team.
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