Time domain radio-astronomy

Pulsars are fast-spinning neutron stars which emit radio beams along their magnetic axis. Since they are rotating, the radio emissions - or pulses - are observed periodically from earth. On a large timescale these pulses are very precise, as such pulsars can be thought of as "cosmic clocks". The physics of pulsars is extreme: gravity, density and magnetic fields and so can't be reproduced in a laboratory. Therefore, study of pulsars can help physicists to gain new knowledge of the universe.

AstroAccelerate

Mike Giles (maths) and Wes delivered the first version of our GPU accelerated de-dispersion algorithm designed to run on NVIDIA GPUs. Wes founded the AstroAccelerate project and produced the very first version of AstroAccelerate with GPU de-dispersion algorithm as a corner stone for the project. First version of AstroAccelerate was designed to work with filterbank files, it included basic Radio Frequency Interference Mitigation, a single pulse search designed for Intel CPUs and a GPU accelerated de-dispersion code for NVIDIA GPUs.

AstroAccelerate is a GPU-enabled software package that focuses on enabling real-time processing of time-domain radio-astronomy data. It uses the CUDA programming language for NVIDIA GPUs.

The massive computational power of modern day GPUs allows the code to perform algorithms such as dedispersion, single pulse searching and Fourier Domain Acceleration Searching in real-time on very large data-sets which are comparable to those which will be produced by next generation radio-telescopes such as the SKA.

Software package

AstroAccelerate is a many core accelerated software package for processing time domain radio-astronomy data. In our git repo you will find:

1. A standalone code that can be used to process filterbank data.
2. A library that can be used to enable GPU accelerated single pulse processing (SPS) or Fourier Domain Acceleration Searching (FDAS).