21cm_Tianlai_March16

jeudi 10 mars 2016, 14:00 → 16:00 Europe/Paris

Minutes from March call (10 March '16):

Present:  NAOC, LAL, Shanghai, FNAL, UW

1)  Data flow from Tianlai

Albert has assembled at Fermilab a data storage site which includes a USB-3 disk enclosure that can handle up to 8 disks and a total of 100 TB.  When arranged as a RAID array the writing speed should be 500 MB/s.  The disks are attached to a computer (with multicore processor) on the internet.  The machine is accessible to registered users:  send an email to Albert  (stebbins@fnal.gov) to get a username and password set up.  Heavy duty computing will probably have to be done on other platforms.   We've talked about using HTCondor, a mechanism for high-throughput computing on distributed platforms:  see research.cs.wisc.edu/htcondor/

Albert will send two of these disks (2 TB each) to NAOC for evaluation.  They use an eSATA interface.

2) Tianlai update

It's proposal -writing time at NAOC so not much new to report from the telescope site.  Two students are there and an older couple have been hired to serve as caretakers.

3) Ultra long wavelength satellite

Xuelei reminded us of his email about this project to measure the radio spectrum below 30 MHz.  Contact him if you are interested in participating. The plan has two parts:   1) a spectrum experiment to be built by the Netherlands will be located on a relay satellite that will be positioned at the Earth-Moon L2 point.  2) an 2-element spatial interferometer formed by two microsatellites will orbit the moon and collect data while on the far side.  Data goes to the relay satellite at L2.  The microsats will be built by the Harbin Institute of Technology.  Time scale is short - first launch slot is June 2018.  Big question is whether the RFI environment provided by the microsats is quiet enough (self- generated rfi)?

Peter