Spotting Radio Transients with the help of GPUs

TL;DR

This paper presents a GPU-based real-time transient radio detection pipeline for the Parkes telescope, enabling immediate analysis and follow-up of transient radio events by overcoming traditional offline processing limitations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel GPU-accelerated pipeline for real-time detection of radio transients, enhancing the speed and immediacy of data analysis in radio astronomy.

Findings

Successful implementation of GPU-based real-time processing

Effective handling of radio frequency interference

Potential for immediate follow-up observations

Abstract

Exploration of the time-domain radio sky has huge potential for advancing our knowledge of the dynamic universe. Past surveys have discovered large numbers of pulsars, rotating radio transients and other transient radio phenomena; however, they have typically relied upon off-line processing to cope with the high data and processing rate. This paradigm rules out the possibility of obtaining high-resolution base-band dumps of significant events or of performing immediate follow-up observations, limiting analysis power to what can be gleaned from detection data alone. To overcome this limitation, real-time processing and detection of transient radio events is required. By exploiting the significant computing power of modern graphics processing units (GPUs), we are developing a transient-detection pipeline that runs in real-time on data from the Parkes radio telescope. In this paper we discuss the algorithms used in our pipeline, the details of their implementation on the GPU and the challenges posed by the presence of radio frequency interference.