A Real-time Single Pulse Detection Algorithm for GPUs

Abstract

The detection of non-repeating events in the radio spectrum has become an important area of study in radio astronomy over the last decade due to the discovery of fast radio bursts (FRBs). We have implemented a single pulse detection algorithm, for NVIDIA GPUs, which use boxcar filters of varying widths. Our code performs the calculation of standard deviation, matched filtering by using boxcar filters and thresholding based on the signal-to-noise ratio. We present our parallel implementation of our single pulse detection algorithm. Our GPU algorithm is approximately 17x faster than our current CPU OpenMP code (NVIDIA Titan XP vs Intel E5-2650v3). This code is part of the AstroAccelerate project which is a many-core accelerated time-domain signal processing code for radio astronomy. This work allows our AstroAccelerate code to perform a single pulse search on SKA-like data 4.3x faster than real-time.