MeerTRAP GPU cluster

Tender description

The MeerTRAP project is supported by the European Research Council, Advanced Grant, awarded to Prof. B.W. Stappers (University of Manchester). The MeeTRAP group consists of four postdoctoral researchers and three PhD students, all placed at the University of Manchester. MeerTRAP will be a real-time, fully-commensal survey for repeating and one-off radio signals originating from pulsars and other fast radio transients using the 64-dish MeerKAT telescope in South Africa. MeerTRAP will piggy-back all the other large surveys performed by MeerKAT, and reuse their data in a completely different way to achieve its goals. Having access to thousands of hours of observing time at its disposal, MeerTRAP must be supported by a high-availability, high-performance GPU cluster to allow for the real-time searching of the incoming data, using optimized GPU pipelines developed by the group. MeerKAT is a precursor telescope for the Square Kilometre Array. The MeerTRAP GPU cluster will be a real-time, commensal processing system hosted in the KAPB, that will process data acquired with the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa. MeerKAT consists of 64 dishes and has the ability to look at many different locations ("beams") in the sky simultaneously. When MeerKAT will be observing, a beamformer (the hardware system responsible for creating these beams), will create 400 beams on the sky simultaneously, with each of them being in essence a data stream. The MeerTRAP cluster will receive these 400 data streams and every GPU in it will be responsible for the real time processing of 3 beams (actually, 396 beams on the 132 GPUs expected to populate the cluster)*. The MeerTRAP cluster will consist a leaf node connected to the spine of the MeerKAT multicast network.