10–14 Oct 2016
San Francisco Marriott Marquis
America/Los_Angeles timezone

Realtime processing of LOFAR data for the detection of particles with the Moon

11 Oct 2016, 15:15
15m
Sierra A (San Francisco Mariott Marquis)

Sierra A

San Francisco Mariott Marquis

Oral Track 1: Online Computing Track 1: Online Computing

Speaker

Dr Tobias Winchen (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)

Description

The low flux of the ultra-high energy cosmic rays (UHECR) at the highest energies provides a challenge to answer the long standing question about their origin and nature. Even lower fluxes of neutrinos with energies above 10^22 eV are predicted in certain Grand-Unifying-Theories (GUTs) and e.g. models for super-heavy dark matter (SHDM). The significant increase in detector volume required to detect these particles can be achieved by searching for the nano-second radio pulses that are emitted when a particle interacts in Earth's moon with current and future radio telescopes.

In this contribution we present the design of an online analysis and trigger pipeline for the detection of nano-second pulses with the LOFAR radio telescope. The most important steps of the processing pipeline are digital focusing of the antennas towards the Moon, correction of the signal for ionospheric dispersion, and synthesis of the time-domain signal from the polyphased-filtered signal in frequency domain. The implementation of the pipeline on a GPU/CPU cluster will be discussed together with the computing performance of the prototype.

Primary Keyword (Mandatory) Trigger
Secondary Keyword (Optional) High performance computing
Tertiary Keyword (Optional) Data processing workflows and frameworks/pipelines

Primary author

Dr Tobias Winchen (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)

Co-authors

Dr Anna Nelles (University of California Irvine) Antonio Bonardi (IMAPP - Radboud University Nijmegen) Arthur Corstanje (Radboud University Nijmegen) Gia Trinh (KVI-CART, University of Groningen) Heino Falcke (Radboud University Nijmegen) J.E. Enriquez (Radboud University Nijmegen) Jörg Hörandel (Ru Nijmegen/Nikhef) Jörg Paul Rachen (IMAPP / Radboud University Nijmegen) Katie Mulrey (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) Dr Laura Rossetto Olaf Scholten (KVI-CART, Univ. of Groningen) Pim Schellart (R) Pragati Mitra (Vrije Universiteit Brussels) Sander ter Veen (ASTRON) Satyendra Thoudam (Radboud University) Stijn Buitink (Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB))

Presentation materials