Bits missing: Finding exotic pulsars using bfloat16 on NVIDIA GPUs

Understand

The Fourier Domain Acceleration Search (FDAS) is an effective technique for detecting faint binary pulsars in large radio astronomy datasets.

• This paper quantifies the sensitivity impact of reducing numerical precision in the GPU accelerated FDAS pipeline of the AstroAccelerate software package.
• The prior implementation used IEEE-754 single-precision in the entire binary pulsar detection pipeline, spending a large fraction of the runtime computing GPU accelerated FFTs.
• AstroAccelerate has been modified to use bfloat16 (and IEEE754 double-precision to provide a "gold standard" comparison) within the Fourier domain convolution section of the FDAS routine.