Cristian Di Pietrantonio

I am a Computer Scientist by formation, working as a Supercomputing Applications Specialist at the Pawsey Centre. Among other things, I specialise in GPU programming and optimisation. I am currently pursuing a part-time Ph.D. at CIRA. My goal is to find and characterise Fast Radio Bursts in the petabyte-sized MWA observation archive, also leveraging my supercomputing skills.


Session

11-04
13:30
15min
BLINK and you’ll miss it: a high time resolution imaging pipeline for fast radio burst searches with the Murchison Widefield Array
Cristian Di Pietrantonio

The Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) can offer a unique insight into the population of low-frequency radio transients in the southern sky due to its wide field of view and unique high-time resolution voltage capture capabilities. The petabyte-sized MWA archive contains raw-voltage observations spanning more than 7 years that can be scoured for objects evolving over time. However, the lack of tools to address the associated computational challenge impairs its potential for systematic discoveries. In this talk I will present the Breakthrough Low-latency Imaging with Next-generation Kernels (BLINK), a high time resolution imaging pipeline. It is a new software designed and developed from the ground up to run image-based fast transient searches at petaFLOPS or even exaFLOPS scale on modern supercomputing infrastructure. It also features a new image-based dedispersion algorithm called Streaming high-Time Resolution Imaging DEdispersion (STRIDE). This imaging pipeline achieves a 3700x speedup compared to a one based on WSClean, while the new dedispersion algorithm, STRIDE, reduces memory requirements by more than 97% in a typical wide-field search scenario. The software has been deployed on Pawsey's Setonix supercomputer to search for Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) in the SMART dataset, a process that analysed 4 PB of voltage data, generating 21 PB of intermediate images, over the course of 6 months. I will present early technical and science results of the search, demonstrating petaFLOPS and petabytes scale computing is possible today.

Building and operating science platforms and workflows in the Petabyte Era
Banquet Hall