A multi-beam backend for SPOTLIGHT, enabling fast transient surveys with the GMRT
Suda HR., Muley M., Bhong D., Katore SN., Kudale SS., Roy J., Chengalur J., Adamek K., Ajudiya K., Armour W., Bane K., Bhattacharyya S., Das J., Debnath R., Deo NP., Dudeja C., Gnanaraj S., Kumar A., Kumari S., Meshram S., Pal A., Panda U., Wani R., Bhattacharyya B., Bhusare Y., Ghosh A., Kale R., Kumar A., Lal B., Ma K., Maan Y., Majee P., Marthi VRR., Sahoo SK., Sarkar S., Sharan R.
SPOTLIGHT is a time-domain survey instrument to perform real-time 24/7 commensal search for Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) and Pulsars with the GMRT [1]. It uses a state-of-the-art GPU-based compute cluster which is expected to generate 2000 post-correlation beams in real-time. We present here details of four main components of the SPOTLIGHT system - 1. the design and architecture of the correlator and post-correlation beamformer, 2. real-time beam synthesis ensuring precise beam shape and tiling of the field-of-view, providing on-the-fly localisation of the burst with up to arc-second accuracy, 3. online control and monitoring system to ensure piggy-back operation with the main backend, the GMRT Wideband Backend (GWB) [2], 4. real-time web-based monitoring tool that visualises the run-time status of the SPOTLIGHT system to track the proper run-time functionality of this fully automated system.