Rust in the skies over Antarctica
February 09, 2024
29 min
Free
rust
astrophysics
particle-physics
dark-matter
data-acquisition
arm-chip
multi-threading
embedded-systems
linux
error-handling
benchmarking
data-processing
Description
The speaker discusses the use of Rust for a critical part of a project in astrophysical particle physics, focusing on the GAPS experiment which aims to detect dark matter by searching for antimatter particles in cosmic rays. The talk details the challenges of operating in Antarctica for this experiment, the constraints of balloon-based systems (weight, bandwidth, power), and how Rust's features like multithreading, efficient error handling, and ease of serialization were crucial in overcoming these limitations and achieving scientific requirements. The presentation also touches upon the signal processing and data acquisition pipelines for the experiment.