This is an old revision of the document!
DRAGNET
One sentence summary: The DRAGNET project extends LOFAR's detection and localization capabilities for pulsars and fast radio transients.
[[http://www.astron.nl/dragnet]]
Introduction
Studying the extreme astrophysics of neutron stars, black holes and other exotica is key to understanding fundamental gravitational and particle physics. Extreme astrophysical phenomena are fleeting, however, and it is a major observational challenge to detect such fast “transients”.
DRAGNET extends LOFAR with a high-speed, wide-angle radio camera mode that is capable of detecting and localizing fast radio transients in real time. We will scan the sky for sub-second bursts coming from previously unpredicted or unobserved astrophysical phenomena, while simultaneously observing hundreds of known radio-emitting neutron stars (pulsars).
The DRAGNET project started in Jan 2014 and runs for 5 years. It is funded by an NWO VIDI and an ERC Starting Grant (+ some funding from NOVA) covering about 8 fte over 3 institutes.
Work Packages
- WP1: Wide-field transient searches
- WP2: Developing DRAGNET++
- WP3: Neutron star monitoring
- WP4: Characterizing the transient radio sky
- WP5: Understanding neutron star magnetospheres
Related Pages
DRAGNET wiki pages
Hardware
- 23 GPU nodes, each: dual Xeon Haswell-EP 2.4 GHz 8 cores, 128 GB RAM, 4x NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan X
- 1 head node + 1 post-processing node with redundant storage
- infiniband network, connected to COBALT
- 10 Gb network, connected to LOFAR Core @ 6×10 Gb
- 1 Gb network
- Support (4 yrs), delivery, installation
ASTRON/LOFAR
LOTAAS and DRAGNET searches
Project Members
- Jason W. T. Hessels (ASTRON, University of Amsterdam) (PI)
- Vlad Kondratiev (ASTRON) (science postdoc)
- Cees Bassa (ASTRON) (science postdoc)
- Alexander S. van Amesfoort (ASTRON) (technical developer)
- Daniele Michilli (University of Amsterdam) (PhD)
- Amruta Jaodand (University of Amsterdam) (PhD)
- Sotiris Sanidas (University of Amsterdam) (science postdoc)
- TBD (Oxford University) (technical developer)