DSPSR: Digital Signal Processing Software for Pulsar Astronomy

TL;DR

DSPSR is a high-performance, open-source software library in C++ designed for digital signal processing in radio pulsar astronomy, supporting multi-core and GPU acceleration, with proven stability and widespread use.

Contribution

This paper details the design, algorithms, and performance analysis of DSPSR, a comprehensive DSP software suite for pulsar astronomy, emphasizing its modularity and hardware optimization.

Findings

DSPSR effectively removes dispersion effects in pulsar signals.

The software demonstrates high performance on modern microprocessor architectures.

It has been in widespread use for over a decade in the pulsar community.

Abstract

DSPSR is a high-performance, open-source, object-oriented, digital signal processing software library and application suite for use in radio pulsar astronomy. Written primarily in C++, the library implements an extensive range of modular algorithms that can optionally exploit both multiple-core processors and general-purpose graphics processing units. After over a decade of research and development, DSPSR is now stable and in widespread use in the community. This paper presents a detailed description of its functionality, justification of major design decisions, analysis of phase-coherent dispersion removal algorithms, and demonstration of performance on some contemporary microprocessor architectures.