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arXiv · 2211.13517

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

Jack White·Karel Adamek·Wes Armour
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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.

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Jack White, Karel Adamek, Wes Armour. 2022-11-24. Cutting the cost of pulsar astronomy: Saving time and energy when searching for binary pulsars using NVIDIA GPUs. https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.13517

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