A GPU-based Correlator X-engine Implemented on the CHIME Pathfinder

We present the design and implementation of a custom GPU-based compute cluster that provides the correlation X-engine of the CHIME Pathfinder radio telescope. It is among the largest such systems in operation, correlating 32,896 baselines (256 inputs) over 400MHz of radio bandwidth. Making heavy use of consumer-grade parts and a custom software stack, the system was developed at a small fraction of the cost of comparable installations. Unlike existing GPU backends, this system is built around OpenCL kernels running on consumer-level AMD GPUs, taking advantage of low-cost hardware and leveraging packed integer operations to double algorithmic efficiency. The system achieves the required 105TOPS in a 10kW power envelope, making it among the most power-efficient X-engines in use today.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures. Accepted by IEEE ASAP 201

Calibrating CHIME, A New Radio Interferometer to Probe Dark Energy

The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) is a transit interferometer currently being built at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory (DRAO) in Penticton, BC, Canada. We will use CHIME to map neutral hydrogen in the frequency range 400 -- 800\,MHz over half of the sky, producing a measurement of baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) at redshifts between 0.8 -- 2.5 to probe dark energy. We have deployed a pathfinder version of CHIME that will yield constraints on the BAO power spectrum and provide a test-bed for our calibration scheme. I will discuss the CHIME calibration requirements and describe instrumentation we are developing to meet these requirements

Limits on the ultra-bright Fast Radio Burst population from the CHIME Pathfinder

We present results from a new incoherent-beam Fast Radio Burst (FRB) search on the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) Pathfinder. Its large instantaneous field of view (FoV) and relative thermal insensitivity allow us to probe the ultra-bright tail of the FRB distribution, and to test a recent claim that this distribution's slope, $\alpha\equiv-\frac{\partial \log N}{\partial \log S}$, is quite small. A 256-input incoherent beamformer was deployed on the CHIME Pathfinder for this purpose. If the FRB distribution were described by a single power-law with $\alpha=0.7$, we would expect an FRB detection every few days, making this the fastest survey on sky at present. We collected 1268 hours of data, amounting to one of the largest exposures of any FRB survey, with over 2.4\,$\times$\,10$^5$\,deg$^2$\,hrs. Having seen no bursts, we have constrained the rate of extremely bright events to $<\!13$\,sky$^{-1}$\,day$^{-1}$ above $\sim$\,220$\sqrt{(\tau/\rm ms)}$ Jy\,ms for $\tau$ between 1.3 and 100\,ms, at 400--800\,MHz. The non-detection also allows us to rule out $\alpha\lesssim0.9$ with 95$\%$ confidence, after marginalizing over uncertainties in the GBT rate at 700--900\,MHz, though we show that for a cosmological population and a large dynamic range in flux density, $\alpha$ is brightness-dependent. Since FRBs now extend to large enough distances that non-Euclidean effects are significant, there is still expected to be a dearth of faint events and relative excess of bright events. Nevertheless we have constrained the allowed number of ultra-intense FRBs. While this does not have significant implications for deeper, large-FoV surveys like full CHIME and APERTIF, it does have important consequences for other wide-field, small dish experiments

Characterization of the John A. Galt telescope for radio holography with CHIME

The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) will measure the 21 cm emission of astrophysical neutral hydrogen to probe large scale structure at redshifts z=0.8-2.5. However, detecting the 21 cm signal beneath substantially brighter foregrounds remains a key challenge. Due to the high dynamic range between 21 cm and foreground emission, an exquisite calibration of instrument systematics, notably the telescope beam, is required to successfully filter out the foregrounds. One technique being used to achieve a high fidelity measurement of the CHIME beam is radio holography, wherein signals from each of CHIME's analog inputs are correlated with the signal from a co-located reference antenna, the 26 m John A. Galt telescope, as the 26 m Galt telescope tracks a bright point source transiting over CHIME. In this work we present an analysis of several of the Galt telescope's properties. We employ driftscan measurements of several bright sources, along with background estimates derived from the 408 MHz Haslam map, to estimate the Galt system temperature. To determine the Galt telescope's beam shape, we perform and analyze a raster scan of the bright radio source Cassiopeia A. Finally, we use early holographic measurements to measure the Galt telescope's geometry with respect to CHIME for the holographic analysis of the CHIME and Galt interferometric data set

A Detection of Cosmological 21 cm Emission from CHIME in Cross-correlation with eBOSS Measurements of the Lyman-α\alpha Forest

We report the detection of 21 cm emission at an average redshift $\bar{z} = 2.3$ in the cross-correlation of data from the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) with measurements of the Lyman-$\alpha$ forest from eBOSS. Data collected by CHIME over 88 days in the $400-500$~MHz frequency band ($1.8 < z < 2.5$) are formed into maps of the sky and high-pass delay filtered to suppress the foreground power, corresponding to removing cosmological scales with $k_\parallel \lesssim 0.13\ \text{Mpc}^{-1}$ at the average redshift. Line-of-sight spectra to the eBOSS background quasar locations are extracted from the CHIME maps and combined with the Lyman-$\alpha$ forest flux transmission spectra to estimate the 21 cm-Lyman-$\alpha$ cross-correlation function. Fitting a simulation-derived template function to this measurement results in a $9\sigma$ detection significance. The coherent accumulation of the signal through cross-correlation is sufficient to enable a detection despite excess variance from foreground residuals $\sim6-10$ times brighter than the expected thermal noise level in the correlation function. These results are the highest-redshift measurement of \tcm emission to date, and set the stage for future 21 cm intensity mapping analyses at $z>1.8$

Silencing of StKCS6 in potato periderm leads to reduced chain lengths of suberin and wax compounds and increased peridermal transpiration

Very long chain aliphatic compounds occur in the suberin polymer and associated wax. Up to now only few genes involved in suberin biosynthesis have been identified. This is a report on the isolation of a potato (Solanum tuberosum) 3-ketoacyl-CoA synthase (KCS) gene and the study of its molecular and physiological relevance by means of a reverse genetic approach. This gene, called StKCS6, was stably silenced by RNA interference (RNAi) in potato. Analysis of the chemical composition of silenced potato tuber periderms indicated that StKCS6 down-regulation has a significant and fairly specific effect on the chain length distribution of very long-chain fatty acids (VLCFAs) and derivatives, occurring in the suberin polymer and peridermal wax. All compounds with chain lengths of C28 and higher were significantly reduced in silenced periderms, whereas compounds with chain lengths of C26 and lower accumulated. Thus, StKCS6 is preferentially involved in the formation of suberin and wax lipidic monomers with chain lengths of C28 and higher. As a result, peridermal transpiration of the silenced lines was about 1.5-times higher than that of the wild type. Our results convincingly show that StKCS6 is involved in both suberin and wax biosynthesis and that a reduction of the monomeric carbon chain lengths leads to increased rates of peridermal transpiration

The effects of calibration errors and foreground filters on the CHIME power spectrum measurement : a study with simulations and real data

The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) is a drift-scan radio telescope designed to map large-scale structure in the universe using the redshifted 21 cm line emitted by neutral hydrogen. By observing the 400 MHz to 800 MHz frequency band, CHIME will measure the expansion rate of the universe in the redshift range z = 0.8 – 2.5 to constrain the nature of dark energy. In this frequency range, astrophysical foregrounds from the Galaxy and extragalactic point sources are much brighter than the 21 cm emission. This requires aggressive foreground filtering. We developed a new implementation of the Karhunen-Loeve transform that correctly tracks the signal and noise power in our data to enable us to filter bright foregrounds. Moreover, we significantly improved the foreground model by modelling the point source sky component based on source count models for both the clustered and Poisson distributed sources with a parameterized maximum flux density cut for point sources which have not been explicitly subtracted from the data. The data volumes for CHIME are extremely large, therefore we developed an upgraded parallelized power spectrum estimation pipeline which is able to forecast the Fisher information matrix and estimate power spectra for three times the frequency range and five times the number of unique baselines by distributing the power spectrum bands across nodes. This allows us to scale the Monte-Carlo simulations to arrays almost as large as CHIME. Due to the bright astrophysical foregrounds CHIME has very stringent calibration requirements. We wrote an end-to-end simulation pipeline and studied various realistic sources of calibration uncertainties with it. The calibration requirements are very stringent and CHIME currently does not quite meet the requirements when using the Karhunen-Loeve foreground filter. We investigated different processing choices on power spectrum estimation with CHIME data in the 610 MHz to 680 MHz band with a selection of short baselines to ensure quick computation times. Even with our currently best calibration procedures our power spectrum estimates are several orders of magnitude higher than the expected from the 21 cm signal. Using a delay filter as an intermediate processing step reduces the power further.Science, Faculty ofPhysics and Astronomy, Department ofGraduat

A study of radio frequency interference for the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) Pathfinder

The following document describes pursued studies to understand the properties of radio frequency interference (RFI) which affects the quality of the data of the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment Pathfinder at the Dominion Radio Astronomy Observatory in Penticton, British Columbia. The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment is a challenging project aimed to trace large scale structure by observing the 21cm emission line of neutral hydrogen in the frequency spectrum 400-800MHz to research the nature of Dark Energy. RFI is terrestrial signal caused by radio bands, TV stations, satellites etc. that produces unwanted disturbances in the frequency spectrum which adds power to the data. It represents a challenge to measure faint sources in the sky and we seek ways to identify it based on its statistical properties such as non-Gaussianity. We have designed algorithms that aim to identify and flag RFI in our data. Digital TV bands cause permanent corruption in the affected frequency bins and account for a 19% loss of bandwidth. The 5 sigma threshold cut searches for time-varying RFI in each frequency bin. Outliers above 5 standard deviations are iteratively flagged but not all of the occurring RFI were recognized due to non-Gaussianity. The median absolute deviation cut is a robust statistical method that uses sky data only. Identification of short-lived and long-lived RFI occurrences originating mainly from the sky has been successful. A correlation coefficient algorithm uses a combination of a reference RFI antenna sensitive to the horizon and a sky antenna to find correlated signals that are significantly above expected thermal noise of the radiometer while disregarding correlation due to sky signal. RFI at the horizon is well recognized by this method.Science, Faculty ofPhysics and Astronomy, Department ofGraduat