Abstract Details
| Name: Niruj Mohan Ramanujam Affiliation: NCRA-TIFR Conference ID: ASI2015_686 Title : A Fully Real-time Pipeline at the GMRT for Detection of Fast Transients Authors and Co-Authors : Sanjay Kudale (NCRA-TIFR), Yashwant Gupta (NCRA-TIFR), Rohini Joshi (Drexel University), Jayanta Roy (Jodrell Bank) Abstract Type : Oral Abstract Category : Instrumentation and Techniques Abstract : A new area in radio astronomy that is opening up is that of fast radio transients. Over the last few years, many examples have been seen of transient sources lasting typically msecs, occurring only once, whose origin is yet unknown. Many radio observatories around the world are gearing up to detect such transients in real-time. Sensitive multi-element instruments like the GMRT can play a significant role in this exploration for fast transients. We present the details of our efforts to build a real-time transient detection system for the GMRT, following-up on an existing off-line pipeline. It is being designed to run in piggy-back mode with any ongoing observation. It exploits the multi-element capability of the GMRT to generate four incoherent array beams from four sub-arrays. Using high performance Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) as compute engines, data from each beam are dedispersed for a range of DMs and short-duration single pulse events are searched for. Finally, these detected events are passed through a coincidence filter to discard spurious candidates. We describe details about the implementation of this real-time pipeline and also present results from initial tests. Issues relating to real-time performance over a range of frequencies, performance on GPUs, fine tuning of the detection algorithms, pipeline optimisation are discussed in detail. Plans for future work are also described. |