An Observation System for Pulsars Based on a GPU Architecture and a Mark5B

Massive pulsar data are being generated through the 40m radio telescope of the Yunnan Observatories. A huge amount of data obtained by the telescope will stay unused if they are not processed in real time. To realize the needed real-time processing we have established a system of a GPU architecture to process data recorded by a Mark5B. The processing includes decoding, coherent removal of dispersion, and data-folding. Our test results show that data obtained in 1 second can be processed within 0.51 second, which meets the requirements of real-time processing. In the paper we first introduce the implementation of each part of the observation system using the GPU architecture. We then compare the speed of each part of the system to that within a traditional CPU architecture. We particularly present the analysis of how the execution efficiency of a single Fourier-transform operation in the removal of dispersion is affected by the amount of data involved, as such operations are the most time consuming in the processing. Result profiles of tests with the system also show that our system meets the requirements of real-time processing. We finally discuss problems of the current system and future studies.