Talk by Prof. Du

Title: Accelerating Gravitational Wave Data Processing on GPU
Time: 1:30pm Dec 5th 2011
Place: 338 Johnston Hall
Speaker: Prof. Zhihui Du, Tsinghua University

We present a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) accelerated time-domain
low-latency algorithm to search for gravitational waves (GWs) from
coalescing binaries of compact objects based on the Summed Parallel Infinite
Impulse Response (SPIIR) filtering technique. The aim is to facilitate fast
detection of GWs with minimum delay to allow prompt electromagnetic
follow-up observations.  To maximize the GPU acceleration,  we apply an
efficient batched parallel computing model that significantly reduces the
number of synchronizations in SPIIR and optimizes the usage of the memory
and hardware resource.  Our code is tested on the latest CUDA Fermi
architecture in a GTX 480 graphics card and its performance is compared with
a single core of Intel Core i7 920 (2.67 GHz). A 47-fold speedup is achieved
while giving results in close agreement with the CPU implementation. Our
result indicates that it is possible to conduct a full search for
gravitational waves from compact binary coalescence in real time with only
one desktop computer equipped with a Fermi GPU card for the current
generation of GW detectors which would otherwise require more than 100 CPUs.