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Paper: The LOFAR Pulsar Data Pipeline
Monograph: 6, Twenty Years of ADASS
Page: 595
Authors:
Abstract: The LOw Frequency ARray (LOFAR) for radio astronomy is being built in the Netherlands by ASTRON, with extensions throughout Europe. LOFAR operates at radio frequencies below 250 MHz. The project is an interferometric array of radio antennas grouped into stations that are distributed over an area of hundreds of kilometers. LOFAR will revolutionise low-frequency radio astronomy. Transient radio phenomena and pulsars are one of six LOFAR Key Science Projects (KSPs). As part of the Transients KSP, the Pulsar Working Group has been developing the LOFAR Pulsar Data Pipeline to both study known pulsars as well as search for new ones. The pipeline is being developed for the Blue Gene/P (BG/P) supercomputer and a large Linux cluster in order to utilize enormous amounts of computation capabilities (∼50 Tflops) and data streams of up to 23TB/hour. The LOFAR pipeline output will be using the Hierarchical Data Format 5 (HDF5) to efficiently store large amounts of numerical data, and to manage complex data encompassing a variety of data types, across distributed storage and processing architectures. We present the LOFAR Pulsar Data Pipeline overview, the pulsar beam-formed data format, the status of the pipeline processing as well as our future plans for developing additional transient pipelines.
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