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We present an overview of the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) based spatial processing system created for the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME). The design employs AMD S9300x2 GPUs and readily-available commercial hardware in its processing nodes to provide a cost- and power-efficient processing substrate. These nodes are supported by a liquid-cooling system which allows continuous operation with modest power consumption and in all but the most adverse conditions. Capable of continuously correlating 2048 receiver-polarizations across 400,MHz of bandwidth, the CHIME X-engine constitutes the most powerful radio correlator currently in existence. It receives $6.6$,Tb/s of channelized data from CHIMEs FPGA-based F-engine, and the primary correlation task requires $8.39times10^{14}$ complex multiply-and-accumulate operations per second. The same system also provides formed-beam data products to commensal FRB and Pulsar experiments; it constitutes a general spatial-processing system of unprecedented scale and capability, with correspondingly great challenges in computation, data transport, heat dissipation, and interference shielding.
Interferometric radio telescopes often rely on computationally expensive O(N^2) correlation calculations; fortunately these computations map well to massively parallel accelerators such as low-cost GPUs. This paper describes the OpenCL kernels developed for the GPU based X-engine of a new hybrid FX correlator. Channelized data from the F-engine is supplied to the GPUs as 4-bit, offset-encoded real and imaginary integers. Because of the low bit width of the data, two values may be packed into a 32-bit register, allowing multiplication and addition of more than one value with a single fused multiply-add instruction. With this data and calculation packing scheme, as many as 5.6 effective tera-operations per second (TOPS) can be executed on a 4.3 TOPS GPU. The kernel design allows correlations to scale to large numbers of input elements, limited only by maximum buffer sizes on the GPU. This code is currently working on-sky with the CHIME Pathfinder Correlator in BC, Canada.
The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) is a novel transit radio telescope operating across the 400-800-MHz band. CHIME is comprised of four 20-m x 100-m semi-cylindrical paraboloid reflectors, each of which has 256 dual-polarization feeds suspended along its axis, giving it a >200 square degree field-of-view. This, combined with wide bandwidth, high sensitivity, and a powerful correlator makes CHIME an excellent instrument for the detection of Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs). The CHIME Fast Radio Burst Project (CHIME/FRB) will search beam-formed, high time-and frequency-resolution data in real time for FRBs in the CHIME field-of-view. Here we describe the CHIME/FRB backend, including the real-time FRB search and detection software pipeline as well as the planned offline analyses. We estimate a CHIME/FRB detection rate of 2-42 FRBs/sky/day normalizing to the rate estimated at 1.4-GHz by Vander Wiel et al. (2016). Likely science outcomes of CHIME/FRB are also discussed. CHIME/FRB is currently operational in a commissioning phase, with science operations expected to commence in the latter half of 2018.
The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) is an airborne astronomical observatory comprised of a 2.5-meter telescope mounted in the aft section of a Boeing 747SP aircraft. During routine operations, several instruments will be available to the astronomical community including cameras and spectrographs in the near- to far-IR. Raw data obtained in-flight require a significant amount of processing to correct for background emission (from both the telescope and atmosphere), remove instrumental artifacts, correct for atmospheric absorption, and apply both wavelength and flux calibration. In general, this processing is highly specific to the instrument and telescope. In order to maximize the scientific output of the observatory, the SOFIA Science Center must provide these post-processed data sets to Guest Investigators in a timely manner. To meet this requirement, we have designed and built the SOFIA Data Processing System (DPS): an in-house set of tools and services that can be used in both automatic (pipeline) and manual modes to process data from a variety of instruments. Here we present an overview of the DPS concepts and architecture, as well as operational results from the first two SOFIA observing cycles (2013--2014).
We have developed FFT beamforming techniques for the CHIME radio telescope, to search for and localize the astrophysical signals from Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) over a large instantaneous field-of-view (FOV) while maintaining the full angular resolution of CHIME. We implement a hybrid beamforming pipeline in a GPU correlator, synthesizing 256 FFT-formed beams in the North-South direction by four formed beams along East-West via exact phasing, tiling a sky area of ~250 square degrees. A zero-padding approximation is employed to improve chromatic beam alignment across the wide bandwidth of 400 to 800 MHz. We up-channelize the data in order to achieve fine spectral resolution of $Delta u$=24 kHz and time cadence of 0.983 ms, desirable for detecting transient and dispersed signals such as those from FRBs.
Polarimetric observations of Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are a powerful resource for better understanding these mysterious sources by directly probing the emission mechanism of the source and the magneto-ionic properties of its environment. We present a pipeline for analysing the polarized signal of FRBs captured by the triggered baseband recording system operating on the FRB survey of The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME/FRB). Using a combination of simulated and real FRB events, we summarize the main features of the pipeline and highlight the dominant systematics affecting the polarized signal. We compare parametric (QU-fitting) and non-parametric (rotation measure synthesis) methods for determining the Faraday rotation measure (RM) and find the latter method susceptible to systematic errors from known instrumental effects of CHIME/FRB observations. These errors include a leakage artefact that appears as polarized signal near $rm{RMsim 0 ; rad , m^{-2}}$ and an RM sign ambiguity introduced by path length differences in the systems electronics. We apply the pipeline to a bright burst previously reported by citet[FRB 20191219F;][]{Leung2021}, detecting an $mathrm{RM}$ of $rm{+6.074 pm 0.006 pm 0.050 ; rad , m^{-2}}$ with a significant linear polarized fraction ($gtrsim0.87$) and strong evidence for a non-negligible circularly polarized component. Finally, we introduce an RM search method that employs a phase-coherent de-rotation algorithm to correct for intra-channel depolarization in data that retain electric field phase information, and successfully apply it to an unpublished FRB, FRB 20200917A, measuring an $mathrm{RM}$ of $rm{-1294.47 pm 0.10 pm 0.05 ; rad , m^{-2}}$ (the second largest unambiguous RM detection from any FRB source observed to date).