PulsarX: a new pulsar searching package -I. A high performance folding program for pulsar surveys

Abstract

Pulsar surveys with modern radio telescopes are becoming increasingly computationally demanding. This is particularly true for wide field-of-view pulsar surveys with radio interferometers, and those conducted in real or quasi-real time. These demands result in data analysis bottlenecks that can limit the parameter space covered by the surveys and diminish their scientific return. In this paper, we address the computational challenge of `candidate folding' in pulsar searching, presenting a novel, efficient approach designed to optimise the simultaneous folding of large numbers of pulsar candidates. We provide a complete folding pipeline appropriate for large-scale pulsar surveys including radio frequency interference (RFI) mitigation, dedispersion, folding and parameter optimization. By leveraging the Fast Discrete Dispersion Measure Transform (FDMT) algorithm proposed by Zackay et al. (2017), we have developed an optimized, and cache-friendly implementation that we term the pruned FDMT (pFDMT). The pFDMT approach efficiently reuses intermediate processing results and prunes the unused computation paths, resulting in a significant reduction in arithmetic operations. In addition, we propose a novel folding algorithm based on the Tikhonov-regularised least squares method (TLSM) that can improve the time resolution of the pulsar profile. We present the performance of its real-world application as an integral part of two major pulsar search projects conducted with the MeerKAT telescope: the MPIfR-MeerKAT Galactic Plane Survey (MMGPS) and the Transients and Pulsars with MeerKAT (TRAPUM) project. In our processing, for approximately 500 candidates, the theoretical number of dedispersion operations can be reduced by a factor of around 50 when compared to brute-force dedispersion, which scales with the number of candidates.

arXiv commentAccepted for publication in A&A

References in corpus (43)

• Shapiro delay measurement of a two solar mass neutron star
• A Massive Pulsar in a Compact Relativistic Binary
• The NANOGrav 15-year Data Set: Evidence for a Gravitational-Wave Background
• Search for an isotropic gravitational-wave background with the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array
• Searching for the nano-Hertz stochastic gravitational wave background with the Chinese Pulsar Timing Array Data Release I
• A New Electron Density Model for Estimation of Pulsar and FRB Distances
• The second data release from the European Pulsar Timing Array III. Search for gravitational wave signals
• DSPSR: Digital Signal Processing Software for Pulsar Astronomy
• Fourier Techniques for Very Long Astrophysical Time Series Analysis
• A morphological algorithm for improving radio-frequency interference detection
• The High Time Resolution Universe Pulsar Survey I: System configuration and initial discoveries
• Precision timing of PSR J0437-4715: an accurate pulsar distance, a high pulsar mass and a limit on the variation of Newton's gravitational constant
• Arecibo Pulsar Survey Using ALFA. I. Survey Strategy and First Discoveries
• Fifty Years of Pulsar Candidate Selection: From simple filters to a new principled real-time classification approach
• The Green Bank Northern Celestial Cap Pulsar Survey - I: Survey Description, Data Analysis, and Initial Results
• The FAST Galactic Plane Pulsar Snapshot survey: I. Project design and pulsar discoveries
• Three Millisecond Pulsars in FERMI LAT Unassociated Bright Sources
• Searching for pulsars using image pattern recognition
• Pulsar Rotation Measures and Large-scale Magnetic Field Reversals in the Galactic Disk
• The Northern High Time Resolution Universe Pulsar Survey I: Setup and initial discoveries
• A 1.4-GHz Arecibo Survey for Pulsars in Globular Clusters
• The LOFAR Tied-Array All-Sky Survey (LOTAAS): Survey overview and initial pulsar discoveries
• Eight new millisecond pulsars from the first MeerKAT globular cluster census
• Parkes radio searches of Fermi gamma-ray sources and millisecond pulsar discoveries
• FAST Globular Cluster Pulsar Survey: Twenty-Four Pulsars Discovered in Fifteen Globular Clusters
• Discovery of millisecond pulsars in radio searches of southern Fermi LAT sources
• Discovery of two millisecond pulsars in Fermi sources with the Nancay Radio Telescope
• The Einstein@Home search for radio pulsars and PSR J2007+2722 discovery
• Five New Millisecond Pulsars From a Radio Survey of 14 Unidentified Fermi-LAT Gamma-ray Sources
• An accurate and efficient algorithm for detection of radio bursts with an unknown dispersion measure, for single dish telescopes and interferometers
• Pulsar searches of Fermi unassociated sources with the Effelsberg telescope
• PEACE: Pulsar Evaluation Algorithm for Candidate Extraction -- A software package for post-analysis processing of pulsar survey candidates
• The MPIfR-MeerKAT Galactic Plane survey I -- System setup and early results
• IQRM: real-time adaptive RFI masking for radio transient and pulsar searches
• Six New Millisecond Pulsars from Arecibo Searches of Fermi Gamma-Ray Sources
• FAST discovery of an extremely radio-faint millisecond pulsar from the Fermi-LAT unassociated source 3FGL J0318.1+0252
• The TRAPUM L-band survey for pulsars in Fermi-LAT gamma-ray sources
• TRAPUM discovery of thirteen new pulsars in NGC 1851 using MeerKAT
• Piggyback search for fast radio bursts using Nanshan 26m and Kunming 40m radio telescopes -- I. Observing and data analysis systems, discovery of a mysterious peryton
• Pulsar Candidate Identification Using Semi-Supervised Generative Adversarial Networks
• A GPU implementation of the Correlation Technique for Real-time Fourier Domain Pulsar Acceleration Searches
• Extending the $Z_n^2$ and $H$ statistics to generic pulsed profiles
• Discovery and timing of three millisecond pulsars in radio and gamma-rays with the GMRT and Fermi-LAT

Cited by in corpus (10)

• The MPIfR-MeerKAT Galactic Plane Survey II. The eccentric double neutron star system PSR J1208-5936 and a neutron star merger rate update
• The TRAPUM Small Magellanic Cloud pulsar survey with MeerKAT: I. Discovery of seven new pulsars and two Pulsar Wind Nebula associations
• TRAPUM search for pulsars in supernova remnants and pulsar wind nebulae -- I. Survey description and initial discoveries
• The TRAPUM Large Magellanic Cloud pulsar survey with MeerKAT I: Survey setup and first seven pulsar discoveries
• TRAPUM pulsar and transient search in the Sextans A and B galaxies and discovery of background FRB 20210924D
• Einstein@Home Searches for Gamma-ray Pulsars in the Inner Galaxy
• Searching for Pulsars, Magnetars, and Fast Radio Bursts in the Sculptor Galaxy using MeerKAT
• A Target Search for Fast Radio Bursts Associated with Two Fast Blue Optical Transients: AT2018cow and CSS161010
• The TRAPUM Small Magellanic Cloud pulsar survey with MeerKAT -- II. Nine new radio timing solutions and glitches from young pulsars
• A survey for radio pulsars and transients in the 10 pc region around Sgr A*