Abstract
One of the key science projects of the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) SKA is to provide a strong-field test of gravitational physics by finding and timing pulsars in extreme binary systems, such as a pulsar-black hole binary. We studied the computational requirements for beam forming and data analysis, assuming the SKADS (SKA Design Studies) design for the SKA, which consists of 15-meter dishes and an aperture array (AA). Beam forming of the 1-km core of the SKA requires no more than 2˙1015 ops. This number can be reduced when the dishes are placed in identical sub-arrays. Limiting the total field of view (FoV) of the AA to 3 deg 2, the maximum data rate from a pulsar survey using the 1-km core becomes about 2.7˙1013 bytes per second and requires a computation power of about 2.6˙1017 ops for a deep real-time analysis.
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Smits, R., Kramer, M., Stappers, B., Faulkner, A. (2009). Computational Requirements for Pulsar Searches with the Square Kilometer Array. In: Parallel Scientific Computing and Optimization. Springer Optimization and Its Applications, vol 27. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-09707-7_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-09707-7_14
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