GALARIO: a GPU accelerated library for analysing radio interferometer observations

2017/09/30 by Marco Tazzari, Frederik Beaujean, Leonardo Testi +1 · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Algorithm #Astronomical interferometer #Astronomy #Astrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena #CUDA #Computation #Computational science #Computer science #Interferometry #Operating system #Parallel computing #Physics #Python (programming language) #Radio Astronomy Observations and Technology #Superconducting and THz Device Technology #astro-ph.CO #astro-ph.EP #astro-ph.GA #astro-ph.IM #astro-ph.SR

paper · pdf · doi:10.1093/mnras/sty409

17 pages, 10 figures. MNRAS Accepted. Code at https://github.com/mtazzari/galario and documentation at https://mtazzari.github.io/galario/

arxiv created 2018/02/12 · openalex publication_date 2018/02/15 · arxiv updated 2018/03/14 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05

Abstract

We present GALARIO, a computational library that exploits the power of modern graphical processing units (GPUs) to accelerate the analysis of observations from radio interferometers like Atacama Large Millimeter and sub-millimeter Array or the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array. GALARIO speeds up the computation of synthetic visibilities from a generic 2D model image or a radial brightness profile (for axisymmetric sources). On a GPU, GALARIO is 150 faster than standard python and 10 times faster than serial c++ code on a CPU. Highly modular, easy to use, and to adopt in existing code, GALARIO comes as two compiled libraries, one for Nvidia GPUs and one for multicore CPUs, where both have the same functions with identical interfaces. GALARIO comes with python bindings but can also be directly used in C or C++. The versatility and the speed of GALARIO open new analysis pathways that otherwise would be prohibitively time consuming, e.g. fitting high-resolution observations of large number of objects, or entire spectral cubes of molecular gas emission. It is a general tool that can be applied to any field that uses radio interferometer observations. The source code is available online at http://github.com/mtazzari/galario under the open source GNU Lesser General Public License v3.

Citations

• The Design and Implementation of FFTW3
• The Noncoplanar Baselines Effect in Radio Interferometry: The W-Projection Algorithm
• The NumPy array: a structure for efficient numerical computation
• Multiwavelength analysis for interferometric (sub-)mm observations of protoplanetary disks
• Numerical recipes: the art of scientific computing
• Montblanc: GPU accelerated Radio Interferometer Measurement Equations in support of Bayesian Inference for Radio Observations
• A multi-wavelength analysis for interferometric (sub-)mm observations of protoplanetary disks: radial constraints on the dust properties and the disk structure

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