Fast Calculation of the Lomb-Scargle Periodogram Using Graphics Processing Units

TL;DR

This paper presents a GPU-accelerated code for fast calculation of the Lomb-Scargle periodogram, significantly improving performance while maintaining accuracy, enabling efficient analysis of large astronomical time series.

Contribution

The paper introduces a GPU-based implementation of the Lomb-Scargle periodogram that achieves high speedups over CPU methods without sacrificing accuracy.

Findings

GPU code matches CPU accuracy

On low-end GPU, performance equals 8 CPU cores

High-end GPU is nearly 30 times faster

Abstract

I introduce a new code for fast calculation of the Lomb-Scargle periodogram, that leverages the computing power of graphics processing units (GPUs). After establishing a background to the newly emergent field of GPU computing, I discuss the code design and narrate key parts of its source. Benchmarking calculations indicate no significant differences in accuracy compared to an equivalent CPU-based code. However, the differences in performance are pronounced; running on a low-end GPU, the code can match 8 CPU cores, and on a high-end GPU it is faster by a factor approaching thirty. Applications of the code include analysis of long photometric time series obtained by ongoing satellite missions and upcoming ground-based monitoring facilities; and Monte-Carlo simulation of periodogram statistical properties.