English

Gravitational-wave inference at GPU speed: A bilby-like nested sampling kernel within blackjax-ns

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2025-09-05 v1 High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics

Abstract

We present a GPU-accelerated implementation of the gravitational-wave Bayesian inference pipeline for parameter estimation and model comparison. Specifically, we implement the `acceptance-walk' sampling method, a cornerstone algorithm for gravitational-wave inference within the bilby and dynesty framework. By integrating this trusted kernel with the vectorized blackjax-ns framework, we achieve typical speedups of 20-40x for aligned spin binary black hole analyses, while recovering posteriors and evidences that are statistically identical to the original CPU implementation. This faithful re-implementation of a community-standard algorithm establishes a foundational benchmark for gravitational-wave inference. It quantifies the performance gains attributable solely to the architectural shift to GPUs, creating a vital reference against which future parallel sampling algorithms can be rigorously assessed. This allows for a clear distinction between algorithmic innovation and the inherent speedup from hardware. Our work provides a validated community tool for performing GPU-accelerated nested sampling in gravitational-wave data analyses.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.04336,
  title  = {Gravitational-wave inference at GPU speed: A bilby-like nested sampling kernel within blackjax-ns},
  author = {Metha Prathaban and David Yallup and James Alvey and Ming Yang and Will Templeton and Will Handley},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.04336},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

13 total pages, 15 total figures (main text: 11 pages, 12 figures; appendix: 2 pages, 3 figures)

R2 v1 2026-07-01T05:21:25.844Z