Multi-GPU maximum entropy image synthesis for radio astronomy

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.Comment: 11 pages, 13 figure

Quantum Computing of Poincare Recurrences and Periodic Orbits

Quantum algorithms are built enabling to find Poincar\'e recurrence times and periodic orbits of classical dynamical systems. It is shown that exponential gain compared to classical algorithms can be reached for a restricted class of systems. Quadratic gain can be achieved for a larger set of dynamical systems. The simplest cases can be implemented with small number of qubits.Comment: revtex, 5 pages, research at Quantware MIPS Center (see http://www.quantware.ups-tlse.fr); minor changes and references adde

Discovery of carbon monoxide in the upper atmosphere of Pluto

Pluto's icy surface has changed colour and its atmosphere has swelled since its last closest approach to the Sun in 1989. The thin atmosphere is produced by evaporating ices, and so can also change rapidly, and in particular carbon monoxide should be present as an active thermostat. Here we report the discovery of gaseous CO via the 1.3mm wavelength J=2-1 rotational transition, and find that the line-centre signal is more than twice as bright as a tentative result obtained by Bockelee-Morvan et al. in 2000. Greater surface-ice evaporation over the last decade could explain this, or increased pressure could have caused the atmosphere to expand. The gas must be cold, with a narrow line-width consistent with temperatures around 50 K, as predicted for the very high atmosphere, and the line brightness implies that CO molecules extend up to approximately 3 Pluto radii above the surface. The upper atmosphere must have changed markedly over only a decade since the prior search, and more alterations could occur by the arrival of the New Horizons mission in 2015.Comment: 5 pages; accepted for publication in MNRAS Letter