BLINK: an End-To-End GPU High Time Resolution Imaging Pipeline for Fast Radio Burst Searches with the Murchison Widefield Array

Abstract

Petabytes of archival high time resolution observations have been captured with the Murchison Widefield Array. The search for Fast Radio Bursts within these using established software has been limited by its inability to scale on supercomputing infrastructure, necessary to meet the associated computational and memory requirements. Hence, past searches used a coarse integration time, in the scale of seconds, or analysed an insufficient number of hours of observations. This paper introduces BLINK, a novel radio interferometry imaging software for low-frequency FRB searches to be run on modern supercomputers. It is implemented as a suite of software libraries executing all computations on GPU, supporting both AMD and NVIDIA hardware vendors. These libraries are designed to interface with each other and to define the BLINK imaging pipeline as a single executable program. Expensive I/O operations between imaging stages are not necessary because the stages now share the same memory space and data representation. BLINK is the first imaging pipeline implementation able to fully run on GPUs as a single process, further supporting AMD hardware and enabling Australian researchers to take advantage of Pawsey's Setonix supercomputer. In the millisecond-scale time resolution imaging test case illustrated in this paper, representative of what is required for FRB searches, the BLINK imaging pipeline achieves a 3687x speedup compared to a traditional MWA imaging pipeline employing WSClean.