Oral Presentation

SPOTLIGHT - A Commensal Real-Time FRB Search and Localisation System for the uGMRT

Author(s): Kshitij Bane (NCRA) and The SPOTLIGHT team

Presenter: Kshitij Bane (National Centre for Radio Astrophysics (NCRA-TIFR), India)

The detection rate of Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) has surged dramatically, yet precise localisation to their host galaxies remains a major challenge. The SPOTLIGHT system at the upgraded Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (uGMRT) is a state-of-the-art real-time pipeline designed for FRB detection and localisation. Operating commensally with regular uGMRT observations, SPOTLIGHT employs a high-performance, multi-node GPU cluster to handle petabyte-scale data processing in real time. The system utilizes 2000 post-correlation beams at ~1.3 ms resolution, along with an HPC+AI-powered transient detection and classification pipeline. This enables triggering for visibility and raw voltage captures, facilitating arc-second imaging localisation and high-time-resolution studies of burst properties across the 300–1460 MHz range. With its unprecedented sensitivity, SPOTLIGHT is expected to detect and localise hundreds of FRBs, significantly enhancing our understanding of FRBs in the local universe. This presentation provides an overview of SPOTLIGHT's technical framework, highlighting its real-time processing architecture and its role in next-generation FRB science.