TY - JOUR

T1 - PulsarX: A new pulsar searching package

T2 - I. A high performance folding program for pulsar surveys

AU - Men, Yunpeng

AU - Barr, Ewan

AU - Clark, Colin J.

AU - Carli, Emma

AU - Desvignes, Gregory

N1 - Funding Information: The authors would like to thank Scott Ransom for his helpful discussion regarding PRESTO. The MeerKAT telescope is operated by the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory, which is a facility of the National Research Foundation, an agency of the Department of Science and Innovation. SARAO acknowledges the ongoing advice and calibration of GPS systems by the National Metrology Institute of South Africa (NMISA) and the time space reference systems department of the Paris Observatory. TRAPUM observations used the FBFUSE and APSUSE computing clusters for data acquisition, storage and analysis. These clusters were funded and installed by the Max-Planck-Institut für Radioastronomie and the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft. E.C. acknowledges funding from the United Kingdom’s Research and Innovation Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) Doctoral Training Partnership, project reference 2487536. Y.P.M., E.B. and G.D. acknowledge continuing support from the Max Planck society.

PY - 2023/11

Y1 - 2023/11

N2 - Context. Pulsar surveys with modern radio telescopes are becoming increasingly computationally demanding. This is particularly true for wide field-of-view pulsar surveys with radio interferometers and those conducted in real or quasi-real time. These demands result in data analysis bottlenecks that can limit the parameter space covered by the surveys and diminish their scientific return. Aims. In this paper we address the computational challenge of 'candidate folding' in pulsar searching, presenting a novel, efficient approach designed to optimise the simultaneous folding of large numbers of pulsar candidates. We provide a complete folding pipeline appropriate for large-scale pulsar surveys that includes radio frequency interference mitigation, de-dispersion, folding, and parameter optimisation. Methods. By leveraging the fast discrete dispersion measure transform (FDMT) algorithm, we have developed an optimised and cache-friendly implementation that we term the pruned FDMT (pFDMT). This implementation is specifically designed for candidate folding scenarios where the candidates are broadly distributed in dispersion measure space. The pFDMT approach efficiently reuses intermediate processing results and prunes the unused computation paths, resulting in a significant reduction in arithmetic operations. In addition, we propose a novel folding algorithm based on the Tikhonov-regularised least squares method that can improve the time resolution of the pulsar profile. Results. We present the performance of its real-world application as an integral part of two major pulsar search projects conducted with the MeerKAT telescope: the MPIfR-MeerKAT Galactic Plane Survey (MMGPS) and the Transients and Pulsars with MeerKAT (TRAPUM) project. In our processing of approximately 500 candidates, the theoretical number of de-dispersion operations can be reduced by a factor of around 50 when compared to brute-force de-dispersion, which scales with the number of candidates.

AB - Context. Pulsar surveys with modern radio telescopes are becoming increasingly computationally demanding. This is particularly true for wide field-of-view pulsar surveys with radio interferometers and those conducted in real or quasi-real time. These demands result in data analysis bottlenecks that can limit the parameter space covered by the surveys and diminish their scientific return. Aims. In this paper we address the computational challenge of 'candidate folding' in pulsar searching, presenting a novel, efficient approach designed to optimise the simultaneous folding of large numbers of pulsar candidates. We provide a complete folding pipeline appropriate for large-scale pulsar surveys that includes radio frequency interference mitigation, de-dispersion, folding, and parameter optimisation. Methods. By leveraging the fast discrete dispersion measure transform (FDMT) algorithm, we have developed an optimised and cache-friendly implementation that we term the pruned FDMT (pFDMT). This implementation is specifically designed for candidate folding scenarios where the candidates are broadly distributed in dispersion measure space. The pFDMT approach efficiently reuses intermediate processing results and prunes the unused computation paths, resulting in a significant reduction in arithmetic operations. In addition, we propose a novel folding algorithm based on the Tikhonov-regularised least squares method that can improve the time resolution of the pulsar profile. Results. We present the performance of its real-world application as an integral part of two major pulsar search projects conducted with the MeerKAT telescope: the MPIfR-MeerKAT Galactic Plane Survey (MMGPS) and the Transients and Pulsars with MeerKAT (TRAPUM) project. In our processing of approximately 500 candidates, the theoretical number of de-dispersion operations can be reduced by a factor of around 50 when compared to brute-force de-dispersion, which scales with the number of candidates.

KW - Methods: data analysis

KW - Pulsars: general

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85176735507&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.48550/arXiv.2309.02544

DO - 10.48550/arXiv.2309.02544

M3 - Article

AN - SCOPUS:85176735507

VL - 679

JO - Astronomy and astrophysics

JF - Astronomy and astrophysics

SN - 0004-6361

M1 - A20

ER -