Hot off the Press!

Many thanks to the OzStar Supercomputer HPC Support Team, who granted our project 100 TB of space to help us store the high volume of data from the Parkes Observatory as we put the finishing touches on our pioneering data processing pipeline.

The PRESS proposal was once again awarded a grade of 4.3 out of 5 and allocated all of the requested time (140 hours) on the Parkes Radiotelescope in the 2020OCT Semester. We are particularly grateful to the ATNF Time Allocation Committee for additionally awarding pre-graded status for the 2021APR semester.

The beta version of the PRESS data reduction pipeline is now running on the OzStar Supercomputer. After it is fully verified, this pipeline will churn through hundreds of Terabytes of observational data, reducing it to a manageable size for storage on the CSIRO Data Access Portal and further analysis by astronomers.

The sources observed during our first session include two pulsars of great historical significance: PSR B1919+21, the first pulsar discovered in 1967 by Jocelyn Bell, and PSR B1937+21, the first millisecond pulsar discovered in 1982 by Don Backer, Shri Kulkarni, Carl Heiles, Michael Davis, and Miller Goss.

Andrew Jameson, Daniel Craig, and Shaun Amy configured and successfully tested the network between the Parkes Observatory and Swinburne University of Technology, thereby establishing a key element the infrastructure that is critical to our observing strategy. As high-resolution data are recorded at Parkes, they are streamed to the OzSTAR Supercomputer for reduction and analysis.

The PRESS proposal was well-received by the ATNF Time Allocation Committee and was awarded a grade of 4.3 out of 5. Our project was subsequently allocated all of the requested time (140 hours) on the Parkes Radiotelescope in the 2020APR Semester.