BLINK and you’ll miss it: a high time resolution imaging pipeline for fast radio burst searches with the Murchison Widefield Array
2026-11-04 –, Banquet Hall

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.

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.