Analysis of Gravitational Wave Signals on Heterogeneous Architectures

Abstract

Heterogeneous architectures and programming techniques will be very important in the development of exascale HPC applications. Adapting heterogeneous programming techniques to scientific programming is not always straightforward. Here we present an in-depth analysis of an astrophysical application used for performing an all-sky coherent search for periodic signals of gravitational waves in narrowband detector data. The application was first ported to the PowerXCell8i architecture and then on the basis of achieved performance it was again redesigned and programmed in a heterogeneous model. Moreover presented heterogeneous techniques could be easily adopted for other scientific computational problems involving FFT computations.