Abstract

Contributed Talk - Splinter EScience

Tuesday, 12 September 2023, 15:15   (H 3005)

Reduction of MeerKAT interferometric data in PUNCH4NFDI

Nicola Malavasi, Kristof Rozgonyi, Joe Mohr
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich (LMU Munich)

PUNCH4NDFI is a NFDI consortium that aims at improving research in physics and astronomy by offering infrastructure and new techniques for accessing, storing, and manipulating data. Compute4PUNCH is the PUNCH4NFDI branch responsible for developing a new federated and powerful computing infrastructure. Other areas in which PUNCH4NFDI aims at improving the status quo are data storage and workflow management. In this talk I will describe a use case for the PUNCH4NFDI infrastructure which involves synergy among all of these components: the reduction of MeerKAT interferometric data taken in the new “OTF” mode. Interferometric scanning or “on-the-fly” (OTF) imaging provides a dramatic improvement in data acquisition efficiency by removing the settle-and-slew overhead and by enabling the commensal observing for intensity mapping and interferometric imaging. This new observing mode is currently being tested at MeerKAT in the context of the MeerKLASS survey, which will target an area of 10˙000 square degrees with 2500 hours worth of observations. I will briefly describe our semi-automatic pipeline, developed for scalable interferometric OTF imaging. I will explain how the pipeline is organized in a sequence of steps (flagging, rotation of phase centers, imaging, co-adding, source extraction) and generally how these are implemented in an optimized way to deal with a massive amount of data. I will finally report on tests of the deployment of the pipeline to existing and future computing infrastructures, such as those provided by PUNCH4NFDI. Ultimately, our experience suggests that a wide range of astronomy data analysis and processing tasks could also be carried out using the new PUNCH4NFDI infrastructure.