Benchmark Results of a Radio Spectrometer Based on Graphics Processing Unit

We set up a project to make spectrometers for single dish observations of the Korean VLBI Network (KVN), a new future multi-beam receiver of the ASTE (Atacama Submillimeter Telescope Experiment), and the total power (TP) antennas of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). Traditionally, spectrometers based on ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated circuit) and FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array) have been used in radio astronomy. It is, however, that a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) technology is now viable for spectrometers due to the rapid improvement of its performance. A high-resolution spectrometer should have the following functions: poly-phase filter, data-bit conversion, fast Fourier transform, and complex multiplication. We wrote a program based on CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) for a GPU spectrometer. We measured its performance using two GPU cards, Titan X and K40m, from NVIDIA. A non-optimized GPU code can process a data stream of around 2 GHz bandwidth, which is enough for the KVN spectrometer and promising for the ASTE and ALMA TP spectrometers.