HCGrid: A Convolution-based Gridding Framework for RadioAstronomy in Hybrid Computing Environments

TL;DR

HCGrid is a high-performance, open-source convolutional gridding framework designed for radio astronomy data processing on CPU-GPU hybrid systems, optimizing data search and convolution to handle large datasets efficiently.

Contribution

The paper introduces HCGrid, a novel convolutional gridding framework that leverages multi-threading and GPU parallelism for improved performance in radio astronomy data reduction.

Findings

Significant performance improvements over CPU-only methods.

Effective strategies for thread organization and parameter tuning.

Compatibility with various GPU architectures for adaptive performance.

Abstract

Gridding operation, which is to map non-uniform data samples onto a uniformly distributedgrid, is one of the key steps in radio astronomical data reduction process. One of the mainbottlenecks of gridding is the poor computing performance, and a typical solution for suchperformance issue is the implementation of multi-core CPU platforms. Although such amethod could usually achieve good results, in many cases, the performance of gridding is stillrestricted to an extent due to the limitations of CPU, since the main workload of gridding isa combination of a large number of single instruction, multi-data-stream operations, which ismore suitable for GPU, rather than CPU implementations. To meet the challenge of massivedata gridding for the modern large single-dish radio telescopes, e.g., the Five-hundred-meterAperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST), inspired by existing multi-core CPU griddingalgorithms such as Cygrid, here we present an easy-to-install, high-performance, and open-source convolutional gridding framework, HCGrid,in CPU-GPU heterogeneous platforms. Itoptimises data search by employing multi-threading on CPU, and accelerates the convolutionprocess by utilising massive parallelisation of GPU. In order to make HCGrid a more adaptivesolution, we also propose the strategies of thread organisation and coarsening, as well as optimalparameter settings under various GPU architectures. A thorough analysis of computing timeand performance gain with several GPU parallel optimisation strategies show that it can leadto excellent performance in hybrid computing environments.