English

Cutting the cost of pulsar astronomy: Saving time and energy when searching for binary pulsars using NVIDIA GPUs

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics 2022-11-28 v1 Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing

Abstract

Using the Fourier Domain Acceleration Search (FDAS) method to search for binary pulsars is a computationally costly process. Next generation radio telescopes will have to perform FDAS in real time, as data volumes are too large to store. FDAS is a matched filtering approach for searching time-domain radio astronomy datasets for the signatures of binary pulsars with approximately linear acceleration. In this paper we will explore how we have reduced the energy cost of an SKA-like implementation of FDAS in AstroAccelerate, utilising a combination of mixed-precision computing and dynamic frequency scaling on NVIDIA GPUs. Combining the two approaches, we have managed to save 58% of the overall energy cost of FDAS with a (<3%) sacrifice in numerical sensitivity.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2211.13517,
  title  = {Cutting the cost of pulsar astronomy: Saving time and energy when searching for binary pulsars using NVIDIA GPUs},
  author = {Jack White and Karel Adamek and Wes Armour},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2211.13517},
  year   = {2022}
}