DIRAC

Distributed radio astronomical computing

Image by: Adolf Schaller NASA-MSFC

The infant Universe (its first-billion years) remains its least explored era. (HI) emission offer many new insights into the infant Universe. In particular, by observing these at higher redshifts or at low radio frequencies, we are able to get a glimpse of the early history and evolution of the Universe. It is possible to observe these ancient HI intensity fluctuations using extremely precise low frequency radio interferometry, provided that all technical challenges are met. The DIRAC project has developed highly distributed and scalable software to tackle the most demanding aspect of data processing to achieve this detection. This software is already being deployed to process Tera-bytes of data taken by the LOFAR radio telescope and the first upper limits in the signal power levels are already published. The knowledge acquired by DIRAC is also made available to other disciplines like machine learning, for instance to improve the training speed. istributed optimization applications.

Participating organisations

ASTRON
Netherlands eScience Center
University of Groningen
Natural Sciences & Engineering
Natural Sciences & Engineering

Impact

Output

Team

SY
Sarod Yatawatta
Ben van Werkhoven
Ben van Werkhoven
Senior eScience Research Engineer
Netherlands eScience Center
AM
Adriënne Mendrik
eScience Coordinator
Netherlands eScience Center
Faruk Diblen
Faruk Diblen
eScience Research Engineer
Netherlands eScience Center
Hanno Spreeuw
Hanno Spreeuw
eScience Research Engineer
Netherlands eScience Center
LK
Leon Koopmans
Co Applicant
Rijksuniversiteit Groningen

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