Arcetri Technical Report 3/2014

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SKA Project Series

The FLDO Module for SKA-PSS

C. Baffa, E.Giani

INAF Osservatorio Astrofisico di Arcetri

Abstract

One of the key scientific projects of the SKA radio telescope is a large survey for pulsars both in isolated and binary systems. The data rate of the pulsar search engine is expected to reach 0.6 TeraSamples/sec. For the purposes of extracting hidden pulses from these streams, we need a complex search strategy which allows us to explore a three dimensional parameter space and it requires approximately 10PetaFlops. This problem is well suited for a parallel computing engine, but the dimensions of SKA bring this problem to a new level of complexity.

Current design is based on a large number of GPUs. The PSS team is actively developing a collection of modules which, acting as a pipeline, will perform this search in real time. The Arcetri group is in charge of the FLDO module, and this report documents the development and test of such module.

Pdf version of this report