QLP Data Release Notes 003: GPU-based Transit Search

TL;DR

This paper introduces a GPU-accelerated transit search algorithm within the Quick-Look Pipeline, enabling rapid analysis of TESS data and significantly reducing computational time from days to about a day per sector.

Contribution

The paper presents a new GPU-based transit search method integrated into QLP, improving processing speed for large TESS datasets compared to previous CPU-based approaches.

Findings

Transit search time reduced to ~1 day per sector

GPU implementation significantly accelerates data processing

Enables analysis of extensive TESS datasets more efficiently

Abstract

The Quick-Look Pipeline (QLP; Huang et al. 2020, Kunimoto et al. 2021 and references therein) searches for transit signals in the multi-sector light curves of several hundreds of thousand stars observed by TESS every 27.4-day sector. The computational expense of the planet search has grown considerably over time, especially as the TESS observing baseline continues to increase in the second Extended Mission. Starting in Sector 59, QLP has switched to a significantly faster GPU-based transit search capable of searching an entire sector in only ~1 day. We describe its implementation and performance.