A GPU implementation of the Correlation Technique for Real-time Fourier Domain Pulsar Acceleration Searches

Abstract

The study of binary pulsars enables tests of general relativity. Orbital motion in binary systems causes the apparent pulsar spin frequency to drift, reducing the sensitivity of periodicity searches. Acceleration searches are methods that account for the effect of orbital acceleration. Existing methods are currently computationally expensive, and the vast amount of data that will be produced by next generation instruments such as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) necessitates real-time acceleration searches, which in turn requires the use of High Performance Computing (HPC) platforms. We present our implementation of the Correlation Technique for the Fourier Domain Acceleration Search (FDAS) algorithm on Graphics Processor Units (GPUs). The correlation technique is applied as a convolution with multiple Finite Impulse Response filters in the Fourier domain. Two approaches are compared: the first uses the NVIDIA cuFFT library for applying Fast Fourier Transforms (FFTs) on the GPU, and the second contains a custom FFT implementation in GPU shared memory. We find that the FFT shared memory implementation performs between 1.5 and 3.2 times faster than our cuFFT-based application for smaller but sufficient filter sizes. It is also 4 to 6 times faster than the existing GPU and OpenMP implementations of FDAS. This work is part of the AstroAccelerate project, a many-core accelerated time-domain signal processing library for radio astronomy.

arXiv comment20 pages, 9 figures. Accepted for publication in ApJS

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• PulsarX: a new pulsar searching package -I. A high performance folding program for pulsar surveys
• Multi-epoch searches for relativistic binary pulsars and fast transients in the Galactic Centre
• A MeerKAT, e-MERLIN, H.E.S.S. and Swift search for persistent and transient emission associated with three localised FRBs
• Contemporaneous optical-radio observations of a fast radio burst in a close galaxy pair
• Bits missing: Finding exotic pulsars using bfloat16 on NVIDIA GPUs
• Accelerating Dedispersion using Many-Core Architectures
• GPU Fast Convolution via the Overlap-and-Save Method in Shared Memory
• A Novel Greedy Approach To Harmonic Summing Using GPUs
• Searching for pulsars in extreme orbits -- GPU acceleration of the Fourier domain 'jerk' search
• Implementing CUDA Streams into AstroAccelerate -- A Case Study
• Efficiency Near the Edge: Increasing the Energy Efficiency of FFTs on GPUs for Real-time Edge Computing