Real-time, fast radio transient searches with GPU de-dispersion

Abstract

The identification, and subsequent discovery, of fast radio transients through blind-search surveys requires a large amount of processing power, in worst cases scaling as O(N3

). For this reason, survey data are generally processed offline, us- ing high-performance computing architectures or hardware-based designs. In recent

years, graphics processing units have been extensively used for numerical analysis and scientific simulations, especially after the introduction of new high-level application

programming interfaces. Here we show how GPUs can be used for fast transient dis- covery in real-time. We present a solution to the problem of de-dispersion, providing

performance comparisons with a typical computing machine and traditional pulsar processing software. We describe the architecture of a real-time, GPU-based transient search machine. In terms of performance, our GPU solution provides a speed-up factor of between 50 and 200, depending on the parameters of the search.