The CHIME Pulsar Project: System Overview

Understand

We present the design, implementation and performance of a digital backend constructed for the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) that uses accelerated computing to observe radio pulsars and transient radio sources.

• When operating, the CHIME correlator outputs 10 independent streams of beamformed data for the CHIME/Pulsar backend that digitally track specified celestial positions.
• Each of these independent streams are processed by the CHIME/Pulsar backend system which can coherently dedisperse, in real-time, up to dispersion measure values of 2500 pc/cm$^{-3}$ .
• The tracking beams and real-time analysis system are autonomously controlled by a priority-based algorithm that schedules both known sources and positions of interest for observation with observing cadences as small as one day.