Accelerating radio astronomy cross-correlation with graphics processing units

作者：Clark M A^*; La Plante P C; Greenhill L J

来源：International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications, 2013, 27(2): 178-192.

DOI：10.1177/1094342012444794

• radio astronomy
• graphics processing units
• signal processing
• correlation

We present a highly parallel implementation of the cross-correlation of time-series data using graphics processing units (GPUs), which is scalable to hundreds of independent inputs and suitable for the processing of signals from %26apos;large-N%26apos; arrays of many radio antennas. The computational part of the algorithm, the X-engine, is implemented efficiently on NVIDIA%26apos;s Fermi architecture, sustaining up to 79% of the peak single-precision floating-point throughput. We compare performance obtained for hardware- and software-managed caches, observing significantly better performance for the latter. The high performance reported involves use of a multi-level data tiling strategy in memory and use of a pipelined algorithm with simultaneous computation and transfer of data from host to device memory. The speed of code development, flexibility, and low cost of the GPU implementations compared with application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) and field programmable gate array (FPGA) implementations have the potential to greatly shorten the cycle of correlator development and deployment, for cases where some power-consumption penalty can be tolerated.

• 出版日期2013-5