scholarly journals DSPSR: Digital Signal Processing Software for Pulsar Astronomy

2011 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. van Straten ◽  
M. Bailes

Abstractdspsr is a high-performance, open-source, object-oriented, digital signal processing software library and application suite for use in radio pulsar astronomy. Written primarily in C++, the library implements an extensive range of modular algorithms that can optionally exploit both multiple-core processors and general-purpose graphics processing units. After over a decade of research and development, dspsr is now stable and in widespread use in the community. This paper presents a detailed description of its functionality, justification of major design decisions, analysis of phase-coherent dispersion removal algorithms, and demonstration of performance on some contemporary microprocessor architectures.

2016 ◽  
Vol 05 (04) ◽  
pp. 1602002 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. C. Price ◽  
J. Kocz ◽  
M. Bailes ◽  
L. J. Greenhill

Advances in astronomy are intimately linked to advances in digital signal processing (DSP). This special issue is focused upon advances in DSP within radio astronomy. The trend within that community is to use off-the-shelf digital hardware where possible and leverage advances in high performance computing. In particular, graphics processing units (GPUs) and field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are being used in place of application-specific circuits (ASICs); high-speed Ethernet and Infiniband are being used for interconnect in place of custom backplanes. Further, to lower hurdles in digital engineering, communities have designed and released general-purpose FPGA-based DSP systems, such as the CASPER ROACH board, ASTRON Uniboard, and CSIRO Redback board. In this introductory paper, we give a brief historical overview, a summary of recent trends, and provide an outlook on future directions.


Author(s):  
Masaki Iwasawa ◽  
Daisuke Namekata ◽  
Keigo Nitadori ◽  
Kentaro Nomura ◽  
Long Wang ◽  
...  

Abstract We describe algorithms implemented in FDPS (Framework for Developing Particle Simulators) to make efficient use of accelerator hardware such as GPGPUs (general-purpose computing on graphics processing units). We have developed FDPS to make it possible for researchers to develop their own high-performance parallel particle-based simulation programs without spending large amounts of time on parallelization and performance tuning. FDPS provides a high-performance implementation of parallel algorithms for particle-based simulations in a “generic” form, so that researchers can define their own particle data structure and interparticle interaction functions. FDPS compiled with user-supplied data types and interaction functions provides all the necessary functions for parallelization, and researchers can thus write their programs as though they are writing simple non-parallel code. It has previously been possible to use accelerators with FDPS by writing an interaction function that uses the accelerator. However, the efficiency was limited by the latency and bandwidth of communication between the CPU and the accelerator, and also by the mismatch between the available degree of parallelism of the interaction function and that of the hardware parallelism. We have modified the interface of the user-provided interaction functions so that accelerators are more efficiently used. We also implemented new techniques which reduce the amount of work on the CPU side and the amount of communication between CPU and accelerators. We have measured the performance of N-body simulations on a system with an NVIDIA Volta GPGPU using FDPS and the achieved performance is around 27% of the theoretical peak limit. We have constructed a detailed performance model, and found that the current implementation can achieve good performance on systems with much smaller memory and communication bandwidth. Thus, our implementation will be applicable to future generations of accelerator system.


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