The UTMOST: A hybrid digital signal processor transforms the MOST
M. Bailes, A. Jameson, C. Flynn, T. Bateman, E. D. Barr, S. Bhandari,, J. D. Bunton, M. Caleb, D. Campbell-Wilson, W. Farah, B. Gaensler, A. J., Green, R. W. Hunstead, F. Jankowski, E. F. Keane, V. Venkatraman Krishnan,, Tara Murphy, M. O'Neill, S. Oslowski, A. Parthasarathy

TL;DR
The UTMOST project upgrades the Molonglo Observatory Synthesis Telescope with digital receivers and GPU-based processing, enabling versatile, real-time radio sky observations of pulsars and FRBs despite challenging radio environments.
Contribution
It introduces a hybrid digital signal processing system using off-the-shelf hardware, transforming MOST into a flexible instrument for dynamic radio sky studies.
Findings
Discovered 7 pulsar glitches and 3 FRBs.
Achieved real-time pulsar timing and FRB searches.
Enhanced field of view and bandwidth for radio observations.
Abstract
The Molonglo Observatory Synthesis Telescope (MOST) is an 18,000 square meter radio telescope situated some 40 km from the city of Canberra, Australia. Its operating band (820-850 MHz) is now partly allocated to mobile phone communications, making radio astronomy challenging. We describe how the deployment of new digital receivers (RX boxes), Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based filterbanks and server-class computers equipped with 43 GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) has transformed MOST into a versatile new instrument (the UTMOST) for studying the dynamic radio sky on millisecond timescales, ideal for work on pulsars and Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs). The filterbanks, servers and their high-speed, low-latency network form part of a hybrid solution to the observatory's signal processing requirements. The emphasis on software and commodity off-the-shelf hardware has enabled rapid…
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