I-LOFAR visit

Week 2:

Monday was a day of coding and reading research papers on LOFAR capabilities and design. My next assignment for codify is to write a code which will print the numbers from 1 to 100. If the number is divisible by 3, print “BISH!”. If the number is divisible by 5, print “BASH!”. If the number is divisible by both 3 and 5, print “BISHBASHBOSH!”.

Tuesday was an early morning heading to Birr to visit the I-LOFAR site. When we arrived we meet with the haling company that will be taking the equipment onto the site. There was also a BBC Northern Ireland film crew with us on site making a documentary on my supervisor first PhD student who is also a truck driver,and will be haling the LOFAR equipment from the Netherlands to Ireland. I also walked around the site of which LOFAR will be built on, and looked at the entries onto the site which the equipment is to be brought through.

During the week I also covered the Transient Buffer Boards; and the Local Control Unit; used in LOFAR and I then moved onto looking at the Wide Area Network and the central processing and started the software control infrastructure looking at monitoring and control systems; and the calibration of the LOFAR antennas paper.

Later on in the week I covered the monitoring and control system; and the system health monitoring (SHM); and the event triggers; and the Observing Modes; and Interferometric imaging; and the beam-formed modes (Coherent Stokes; Incoherent Stokes; and Fly’s Eye); and the direct storage modes.

I also had journal club last Friday were the Post doctorates covered the papers on “Extreme geomagnetic storms: Probabilistic forecasts and their uncertainties” and “Quantifying the daily economic impact of extreme space weather due to failure in electricity transmission infrastructure”; it was so interesting as they made the papers into power points, which we then had discussions on how these affect may affect Ireland.