Image credit: Chris Blake and Sam Moorfield. The high-cadence of these observations will allow us to investigate the properties of neutron stars and ionized gas in the interstellar medium as well as verify the predictions of general relativity and search for gravitational waves.īaryon acoustic oscillations are imprinted on the matter distribution in the early Universe and their effects can still be seen in galaxy surveys. The data output from the pulsar timing monitor is approximately 500,000 gigabytes per year. The results from the timing analysis are stored on a local multi-disk server before being shipped to Compute Canada. Each node consists of a high-powered Intel processor that assembles the incoming data before passing it to an NVIDIA TitanX GPU for timing analysis. The timing monitor processes the signals in real time on ten dedicated compute nodes. The signals are sent from the X-engine to the pulsar timing monitor via a high-speed network. CHIME will sample each of the ten sky-tracking beams at a resolution of 6.4 billion bits per second. The pulsar monitoring instrument will receive ten sky-tracking beams produced by CHIME's X-engine. Once an FRB event has been detected, an automatic alert will be sent, within seconds of the arrival of the burst, to the CHIME team and to the wider astrophysical community allowing for rapid follow up of the burst.ĬHIME has the sensitivity to monitor practically all known pulsars in the Northern sky. Candidate FRBs are then passed to a second stage of processing which combines information from all 1024 beams to determine the location, distance and characteristics of the burst.
Each compute node will search eight individual beams for FRBs.
The FRB search backend will consist of 128 compute nodes with over 2500 CPU cores and 32,000 GB of RAM. The data are packaged in the X-engine and shipped via a high-speed network to the FRB backend search engine, which is housed in its own 40-foot shipping container under the CHIME telescope. Each beam is sampled at 16,000 different frequencies and at a rate of 1000 times per second, corresponding to 130 billion bits of data per second to be sifted through in real time. To search for FRBs, CHIME will continuously scan 1024 separate points or “beams” on the sky 24/7.