Parallel optimization of the pulsar search pipeline on China SKA Regional Centre Prototype

Subjects: Computer Science >> Other Disciplines of Computer Science submitted time 2022-06-28

Wei, Jianwen Zhang, Chenfei Zhang, Zhongli Yu, Ting Lin, James An, Tao

Abstract：

The connection between astronomy and high performance computing is becoming stronger with the devel- opment of cutting-edge observing facilities such as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) and the proposed innovative platform for big data and high performance computing. Astronomical computation is character- ized by huge data volume and massive parallelism, especially for pulsar search which is one of the leading scientific directions of the SKA. In this paper, we present an approach to accelerate the pulsar search pipeline based on OpenMP and multiprocessing techniques, propose a method to solve the load imbalance problem,and successfully has the pipeline installed on both x86 and ARM compute nodes on China SKA regional center prototype (CSRC-P). The performance evaluation from the tests on the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) VCS observations shows that our optimization method works well on both x86 and ARM nodes, improving the relative speedup by a factor of 10.4–12.2 and 24.5–27.6, respectively, compared to the original single- thread approach. The ARM platform was found to be 1.1–1.3 times faster than the x86 platform in the tested cases, showing its great potential for SKA data processing. Recently, this optimized pulsar search pipeline deployed on CSRC-P will be especially used for low-frequency pulsar survey of the Southern-sky MWA Rapid Two-metre (SMART) program,for various scientific goals including pulsar timing arrays for gravitational wave detections.

Peer Review Status:Awaiting Review

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