This award is to support development and test the accelerated, efficient reconstruction and beam-forming algorithms for radio astronomical detectors. When possible, computations will be ported out to the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) clusters that provide massively parallel floating-point capabilities. This approach is ideally suited to the data generated by digital radio astronomy arrays, and especially well suited when the respective hardware is deployment at remote observation sites - because of the proposed algorithms show excellent performance-to-power efficiency when compared to general-purpose supercomputers. Additionally, the real-time (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) FPGA-based algorithms will be developed for radio transient data reduction. They will help developing accelerated radio simulation methods to support and validate the proposed methodology. These algorithms and methodology will be tested at the Askaryan Radio Array (ARA), an array of in-ice antennae deployed in the U.S. Antarctic South Pole Station to detect highest-energy neutrinos coming from the deep Universe sources. The award's broader impacts are in the use of high-performance parallel computing and efficient real-time data reduction in the fields of radio astronomy, cosmology, and particle astrophysics. Expansion of the use of GPUs will provide the necessary computing power for next-generation experiments in a sustainable, efficient way. The post-doctoral researcher and graduate student will be part of the overall development and testing. In addition, undergraduate students will also be involved in the research. An on-line public research component will be developed to engage "citizen scientists" in the analysis of radio astronomy data on home computers.
