Abstract
We present a new approach to searching for Continuous gravitational Waves (CWs) emitted by isolated rotating neutron stars, using the high parallel computing efficiency and computational power of modern Graphic Processing Units (GPUs). Specifically, in this paper the porting of one of the algorithms used to search for CW signals, the so-called FrequencyHough transform, on the TensorFlow framework, is described. The new code has been fully tested and its performance on GPUs has been compared to those in a CPU multicore system of the same class, showing a factor of 10 speed-up. This demonstrates that GPU programming with general purpose libraries (the those of the TensorFlow framework) of a high-level programming language can provide a significant improvement of the performance of data analysis, opening new perspectives on wide-parameter searches for CWs.
Highlights
Gravitational waves are a phenomenon described by Albert Einstein in his Theory of General Relativity [1,2] as perturbations of space-time generated by a mass distribution with time varying quadrupole moment: they propagate as variations of the space-time metric, changing, in time, the proper distance between space-time points.The first direct detection of gravitational waves by LIGO and Virgo collaborations [3]has opened a new window into observing the Universe
Once we have selected the candidates from both detectors, they are stored in files where their parameters are saved, and this is the final output of the FrequencyHough transform step
The FrequencyHough transform is a special implementation of Continuous gravitational Waves (CWs) searches of the so-called Hough transform, a pattern-recognition method [22] that was conceived for the study of subatomic particle tracks in bubble chambers, where curved tracks are divided, with good approximation, in sufficiently small line segments
Summary
Gravitational waves are a phenomenon described by Albert Einstein in his Theory of General Relativity [1,2] as perturbations of space-time generated by a mass distribution with time varying quadrupole moment: they propagate as variations of the space-time metric, changing, in time, the proper distance between space-time points. Waves (CWs), as a consequence of an asymmetry with respect to the rotation axis The search for this class of signals is challenging, mainly because they are much weaker than those from compact binary coalescences (see [3,4,5,6]). The main challenge in all-sky searches is the computational cost of the data analysis, which is so far unaffordable with respect to the cited compact binary coalescence searches, if we want to adequately cover the search parameter space with a coherent method. To this purpose, hierarchical analysis algorithms (so-called pipelines) have been developed Universe 2021, 7, 218 to analyze data from the third observing scientific LIGO-Virgo detectors, and the related results will be disclosed in an upcoming observational paper
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