Speaker
Description
Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are mysterious extremely bright millisecond radio pulses of predominately extra-galactic origin. Despite hundreds of FRBs discovered at frequencies above 400 MHz, only a handful have been detected below 400 MHz. One of the reasons for this is the computational complexity of FRB searches at these frequencies. Firstly, dispersion of radio signals causes time delays of the order of tens of seconds, which requires large amounts of computer memory (even of the order of a Tb). Secondly, large fields of views (FoVs) of low-frequency aperture arrays require formation and searchers over multiple beams (or image pixels). We have developed a new high-time resolution imaging pipeline BLINK, which enables high-time resolution imaging and efficient FRB searches with low-frequency radio telescopes.The BLINK pipeline has been implemented in C++ and performs all the operations on Graphical Processing Units (GPUs). For our fast-imaging use case, the BLINK pipeline performs over 3500x faster than the WSCLEAN imaging package. Once the full pipeline is completed, it will be used to process tens of Petabytes of high-time resolution data from the Murchison Widefield Array telescope. We intend to make the pipeline applicable for future FRB, pulsar and transient searches with other radio telescopes.
