VOLKS2: a transient search and localization pipeline for VLBI observations

TL;DR

VOLKS2 is a GPU-accelerated VLBI pipeline for transient detection and localization, eliminating the need for RFI flagging and demonstrating high efficiency and accuracy in real observations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel VLBI transient search pipeline that uses geodetic VLBI techniques, optimized with GPU acceleration, and does not require RFI flagging.

Findings

Achieves comparable performance to auto spectrum based pipelines.

Effectively eliminates RFI without flagging.

Demonstrates high detection efficiency and localization accuracy in EVN observations.

Abstract

We present VOLKS2, the second release of "VLBI Observation for transient Localization Keen Searcher". The pipeline aims at transient search in regular VLBI observations as well as detection of single pulses from known sources in dedicated VLBI observations. The underlying method takes the idea of geodetic VLBI data processing, including fringe fitting to maximize the signal power and geodetic VLBI solving for localization. By filtering the candidate signals with multiple windows within a baseline and by cross matching with multiple baselines, RFIs are eliminated effectively. Unlike the station auto spectrum based method, RFI flagging is not required in the VOLKS2 pipeline. EVN observation (EL060) is carried out, so as to verify the pipeline's detection efficiency and localization accuracy in the whole FoV. The pipeline is parallelized with MPI and further accelerated with GPU, so as to exploit the hardware resources of modern GPU clusters. We can prove that, with proper optimization, VOLKS2 could achieve comparable performance as auto spectrum based pipelines. All the code and documents are publicly available, in the hope that our pipeline is useful for radio transient studies.