Pulsar Acceleration Searches on the GPU for the Square Kilometre Array

Abstract

Pulsar acceleration searches are methods for recovering signals from radio telescopes, that may otherwise be lost due to the effect of orbital acceleration in binary systems. The vast amount of data that will be produced by next generation instruments such as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) necessitates real-time acceleration searches, which in turn requires the use of HPC platforms. We present our implementation of the Fourier Domain Acceleration Search (FDAS) algorithm on Graphics Processor Units (GPUs) in the context of the SKA, as part of the Astro-Accelerate real-time data processing library, currently under development at the Oxford e-Research Centre (OeRC), University of Oxford.