Coffee talks
Friday 31/01/2025 @ 11:30, Sala riunioni quarto piano e on line (meet.google.com/sue-bwvk-axf)
Emanuele De Rubeis (INAF-IRA), "Accelerating radio astronomy with RICK"
Since the last decade, radio astronomy has started a new era: the advent of the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), preceded by its pathfinders (like Low Frequency Array, LOFAR, or MeerKAT), will produce a huge amount of data that will be hard to process with a traditional approach. This means that the current state-of-the-art software for data reduction and imaging will have to be re-modelled to face such data challenge. In order to manage such an increase in data size and computational requirements, scientists need to exploit modern HPC architectures. In particular, heterogeneous systems, based on complex combinations of CPUs, accelerators, high-speed networks and composite storage devices need to be used in an efficient and effective way. I will present Radio Imaging Code Kernels (RICK), a code able to perform the most computationally demanding step of radio interferometric imaging, namely the gridding, the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), and the phase-correction, fully exploiting parallelism and GPU acceleration. I will go into the details of the (multi-)GPU approach to the problem, analyzing its performance and comparing it to the MPI-OpenMP, CPU parallel approach, considering both the computational and communication workload. This code is now publicly available and has been tested with a wide variety of modern interferometers and SKA pathfinders. This represents, at today, the first example of radio imaging software fully enabled to GPUs, becoming a potential state-of-the-art approach for the upcoming SKA. Finally, I will also present the future perspectives about the code, planned to be converted into a library and possibly be used by any of the most-used softwares for imaging (such as CASA or WSClean).