Title: Multi-GPU maximum entropy image synthesis for radio astronomy,
Abstract: The maximum entropy method (MEM) is a well known deconvolution technique in
radio-interferometry. This method solves a non-linear optimization problem with
an entropy regularization term. Other heuristics such as CLEAN are faster but
highly user dependent. Nevertheless, MEM has the following advantages: it is
unsupervised, it has a statistical basis, it has a better resolution and better
image quality under certain conditions. This work presents a high performance
GPU version of non-gridding MEM, which is tested using real and simulated data.
We propose a single-GPU and a multi-GPU implementation for single and
multi-spectral data, respectively. We also make use of the Peer-to-Peer and
Unified Virtual Addressing features of newer GPUs which allows to exploit
transparently and efficiently multiple GPUs. Several ALMA data sets are used to
demonstrate the effectiveness in imaging and to evaluate GPU performance. The
results show that a speedup from 1000 to 5000 times faster than a sequential
version can be achieved, depending on data and image size. This allows to
reconstruct the HD142527 CO(6-5) short baseline data set in 2.1 minutes,
instead of 2.5 days that takes a sequential version on CPU.