Tricolour: an optimized SumThreshold flagger for MeerKAT

TL;DR

Tricolour is an optimized, highly configurable software package that efficiently mitigates radio frequency interference in MeerKAT data, enabling high-speed processing of large datasets using modern parallel computing technologies.

Contribution

We developed Tricolour, a parallel, optimized flagger employing SumThreshold and MAD algorithms, tailored for MeerKAT's wideband data, achieving high processing speeds.

Findings

Processing rate exceeds 400 GiB/hr on modern hardware.

Effective mitigation of satellite and terrestrial interference.

Highly configurable and scalable for large datasets.

Abstract

We present Tricolour, a package for Radio Frequency Interference mitigation of wideband finely channelized MeerKAT correlation data. The MeerKAT passband is heavily affected by interference from satellite, mobile, aircraft and terrestrial transponders. Coupled with typical data rates in excess of 100 GiB/hr at 208kHz channelization resolution, mitigation poses a significant processing challenge. Our flagger is highly configurable, parallel and optimized, employing Dask and Numba technologies to implement the widely used SumThreshold and MAD interference detection algorithms. We find that typical 208kHz channelized datasets can be processed at rates in excess of 400 GiB/hr for a typical L-band flagging strategy on a modern dual-socket Intel Xeon server.