J 2023

Bits Missing: Finding Exotic Pulsars Using bfloat16 on NVIDIA GPUs

WHITE, Jack, Karel ADÁMEK, Jayanta ROY, Sofia DIMOUDI, Scott M. RANSOM et. al.

Basic information

Original name

Bits Missing: Finding Exotic Pulsars Using bfloat16 on NVIDIA GPUs

Authors

WHITE, Jack, Karel ADÁMEK (203 Czech Republic, belonging to the institution), Jayanta ROY, Sofia DIMOUDI, Scott M. RANSOM and Wesley ARMOUR

Edition

Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, GB - Spojené království Velké Británie a, 2023, 0067-0049

Other information

Language

English

Type of outcome

Článek v odborném periodiku

Field of Study

10308 Astronomy

Country of publisher

United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

Confidentiality degree

není předmětem státního či obchodního tajemství

References:

RIV identification code

RIV/47813059:19630/23:A0000313

Organization unit

Institute of physics in Opava

UT WoS

000937555700001

Keywords in English

detecting ;binary pulsars; radio astronomy data sets

Tags

Tags

International impact, Reviewed
Změněno: 15/2/2024 11:18, Mgr. Pavlína Jalůvková

Abstract

V originále

The Fourier domain acceleration search (FDAS) is an effective technique for detecting faint binary pulsars in large radio astronomy data sets. This paper quantifies the sensitivity impact of reducing numerical precision in the graphics processing unit (GPU)-accelerated FDAS pipeline of the AstroAccelerate (AA) software package. The prior implementation used IEEE-754 single-precision in the entire binary pulsar detection pipeline, spending a large fraction of the runtime computing GPU-accelerated fast Fourier transforms. AA has been modified to use bfloat16 (and IEEE-754 double-precision to provide a "gold standard" comparison) within the Fourier domain convolution section of the FDAS routine. Approximately 20,000 synthetic pulsar filterbank files representing binary pulsars were generated using SIGPROC with a range of physical parameters. They have been processed using bfloat16, single-precision, and double-precision convolutions. All bfloat16 peaks are within 3% of the predicted signal-to-noise ratio of their corresponding single-precision peaks. Of 14,971 "bright" single-precision fundamental peaks above a power of 44.982 (our experimentally measured highest noise value), 14,602 (97.53%) have a peak in the same acceleration and frequency bin in the bfloat16 output plane, while in the remaining 369 the nearest peak is located in the adjacent acceleration bin. There is no bin drift measured between the single- and double-precision results. The bfloat16 version of FDAS achieves a speedup of approximately 1.6x compared to single-precision. A comparison between AA and the PRESTO software package is presented using observations collected with the GMRT of PSR J1544+4937, a 2.16 ms black widow pulsar in a 2.8 hr compact orbit.