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| Paper: |
Fitting Galaxies on GPUs |
| Volume: |
442, Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems XX (ADASSXX) |
| Page: |
451 |
| Authors: |
Barsdell, B. R.; Barnes, D. G.; Fluke, C. J. |
| Abstract: |
Structural parameters are normally extracted from observed galaxies by
fitting analytic light profiles to the observations. Obtaining
accurate fits to high-resolution images is a computationally expensive
task, requiring many model evaluations and convolutions with the
imaging point spread function. While these algorithms contain high
degrees of parallelism, current implementations do not exploit this
property. With ever-growing volumes of observational data, an
inability to make use of advances in computing power can act as a
constraint on scientific outcomes. This is the motivation behind our
work, which aims to implement the model-fitting procedure on a
graphics processing unit (GPU). We begin by analysing the algorithms
involved in model evaluation with respect to their suitability for
modern many-core computing architectures like GPUs, finding them to be
well-placed to take advantage of the high memory bandwidth offered by
this hardware. Following our analysis, we briefly describe a
preliminary implementation of the model fitting procedure using
freely-available GPU libraries. Early results suggest a speed-up of
around 10× over a CPU implementation. We discuss the
opportunities such a speed-up could provide, including the ability to
use more computationally expensive but better-performing fitting
routines to increase the quality and robustness of fits. |
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