A GPU-based survey for millisecond radio transients using ARTEMIS
ArXiv 1111.6399 (2011)
Authors:
W Armour, A Karastergiou, M Giles, C Williams, A Magro, K Zagkouris, S Roberts, S Salvini, F Dulwich, B Mort
Abstract:
Astrophysical radio transients are excellent probes of extreme physical
processes originating from compact sources within our Galaxy and beyond. Radio
frequency signals emitted from these objects provide a means to study the
intervening medium through which they travel. Next generation radio telescopes
are designed to explore the vast unexplored parameter space of high time
resolution astronomy, but require High Performance Computing (HPC) solutions to
process the enormous volumes of data that are produced by these telescopes. We
have developed a combined software /hardware solution (code named ARTEMIS) for
real-time searches for millisecond radio transients, which uses GPU technology
to remove interstellar dispersion and detect millisecond radio bursts from
astronomical sources in real-time. Here we present an introduction to ARTEMIS.
We give a brief overview of the software pipeline, then focus specifically on
the intricacies of performing incoherent de-dispersion. We present results from
two brute-force algorithms. The first is a GPU based algorithm, designed to
exploit the L1 cache of the NVIDIA Fermi GPU. Our second algorithm is CPU based
and exploits the new AVX units in Intel Sandy Bridge CPUs.
