GPU Accelerated Radio Astronomy Signal Convolution

The increasing array size of radio astronomy interferometers is causing the associated computation to scale quadratically with the number of array signals. Consequently, efficient usage of alternate processing architectures should be explored in order to meet this computational challenge. Affordable parallel processors have been made available to the general scientific community in the form of the commodity graphics card. This work investigates the use of the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) in the parallelisation of the combined conjugate multiply and accumulation stage of a correlator for a radio astronomy array. Using NVIDIA’s Compute Unified Device Architecture, our testing shows processing speeds from one to two orders of magnitude faster than a Central Processing Unit (CPU) approach.