A project for developing an HPC facility with PetaFlop computing capacity for conducting a real-time commensal search for Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) and pulsars with the GMRT is funded under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM). The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) and NCRA have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to jointly build the data centre to host 60 of CDAC's indigenously developed Rudra servers hosting 90 A100 GPUs, 10s TB memory and 2 PB storage. This instrument aims to discover more than a few hundred fast transient sources with host galaxy association as well as several hundreds of pulsars over the next few years of scientific operation.
The system will be equipped to accept GMRT digitiser outputs at a rate of 25 GB/s using 32 of 10Gb fibre links and process them on a 24*7 basis. The correlator and beamformer will form 2000 beams covering 50% of the field-of-view using phased addition of visibilities of all the antennas within a moderate length of baselines. The time-domain event detection system searching for millisecond bursts and periodic signals up to a dispersion measure (DM) limit of 2000 pc cm-3 over a frequency range of 300-1460 MHz is being developed in collaboration with the Oxford e-Research Centre, University of Oxford. A team for developing the Deep Learning classifier for optimising triggers for baseband voltage capturing and imaging is formed with IIT-Palakkad and Industry partners Nvidia under the NVIDIA AI Technology Center (NVAITC) project. The design activities for building the data centre having the required power, cooling and EMI shielding are currently undergoing at the observatory. The successful execution of this project will enable transformational, high-impact science in time-domain astronomy with the GMRT along with being a trigger for cutting-edge technology development in the country.