A CPU/GPU/FGPA telescope upgrade for Fast Radio Burst searching

Tue, October 13, 2015

Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are examples of dispersed radio pulses with such large sweeps in time that they appear to come from cosmological distances. Swinburne has provided a new custom 250 Tflop GPU cluster for the 18,000 m^2 Molonglo Observatory Synthesis Telescope to find more FRBs. This upgrade combines FGPAs, CPUs and GPUs to produce fan beams that can be searched in dispersion for Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) and single pulses from radio pulsars whilst doing normal science. I will outline the architecture and progress on this upgrade as well as future plans and talk about the most recent FRBs discovered at the Parkes radio telescope.