A GPU based single-pulse search pipeline (GSP) with database and its application to the commensal radio astronomy FAST survey (CRAFTS)

TL;DR

This paper presents GSP, a GPU-accelerated single-pulse search pipeline with a database, enabling real-time processing and improved detection of pulsars, RRATs, and FRBs in FAST survey data.

Contribution

The paper introduces GSP, a GPU-based pipeline with a candidate database, significantly enhancing processing speed and detection capabilities for radio transient surveys.

Findings

GSP is ~120 times faster than PRESTO.

GSP detected all known pulsars in test data.

GSP discovered 13 new pulsars.

Abstract

We developed a GPU based single-pulse search pipeline (GSP) with candidate-archiving database. Largely based upon the infrastructure of Open source pulsar search and analysis toolkit (PRESTO), GSP implements GPU acceleration of the de-dispersion and integrates a candidate-archiving database. We applied GSP to the data streams from the commensal radio astronomy FAST survey (CRAFTS), which resulted in a quasi-real-time processing. The integrated candidate database facilitates synergistic usage of multiple machine-learning tools and thus improves efficient identification of radio pulsars such as rotating radio transients (RRATs) and Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs). We first tested GSP on pilot CRAFTS observations with the FAST Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) receiver. GSP detected all pulsars known from the the Parkes multibeam pulsar survey in the respective sky area covered by the FAST-UWB. GSP also discovered 13 new pulsars. We measured the computational efficiency of GSP to be ~120 times faster than the original PRESTO and ~60 times faster than a MPI-parallelized version of PRESTO.