Published October 6, 2025 | Version Published
Journal Article Open

Scalable matched-filtering pipeline for gravitational-wave searches of compact binary mergers

  • 1. ROR icon Pennsylvania State University
  • 2. ROR icon California Institute of Technology
  • 3. ROR icon University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee
  • 4. ROR icon University of Nevada, Las Vegas
  • 5. ROR icon Louisiana State University
  • 6. ROR icon Georgia Institute of Technology

Abstract

As gravitational-wave observations expand in scope and detection rate, the data analysis infrastructure must be modernized to accommodate rising computational demands and ensure sustainability. We present a scalable gravitational-wave search pipeline that modernizes the gstlal pipeline by adapting the core filtering engine to the pytorch framework, enabling flexible execution on both central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs). Offline search results on the same 8.8 day stretch of public gravitational-wave data indicate that the gstlal and the pytorch adaptation demonstrate comparable search performance, even with float16 precision. Lastly, computational benchmarking results show that the pytorch adaptation executed on an A100 GPU achieves speedups of up to 169 times in the GPU float16 configuration and 123 times in the GPU float32 configuration, compared to gstlal’s performance on a single CPU core.

Copyright and License

© 2025 American Physical Society.

Acknowledgement

This material is based upon work supported by NSF’s LIGO Laboratory, which is a major facility fully funded by the National Science Foundation. LIGO Laboratory and Advanced LIGO are funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) as well as the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) of the United Kingdom, the Max-Planck-Society (MPS), and the State of Niedersachsen/Germany for support of the construction of Advanced LIGO and construction and operation of the GEO600 detector. Additional support for Advanced LIGO was provided by the Australian Research Council. Virgo is funded, through the European Gravitational Observatory (EGO), by the French Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), the Italian Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) and the Dutch Nikhef, with contributions by institutions from Belgium, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Japan, Monaco, Poland, Portugal, and Spain. The authors are grateful for computational resources provided by the Pennsylvania State University’s Institute for Computational and Data Sciences gravitational-wave cluster, and the LIGO Lab cluster at the LIGO Laboratory, and supported by the National Science Foundation Awards No. OAC-2103662, No. PHY-2308881, No. PHY-2011865, No. OAC-2201445, No. OAC-2018299, No. PHY-0757058, No. PHY-0823459, and No. PHY-2207728. C. H. acknowledges generous support from the Eberly College of Science, the Department of Physics, the Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos, and the Institute for Computational and Data Sciences. This research has made use of data, software, and/or web tools obtained from the Gravitational Wave Open Science Center [31], a service of LIGO Laboratory, the LIGO Scientific and the Virgo Collaborations. We especially made heavy use of the LVK Algorithm Library [32].

Data Availability

The data that support the findings of this article are openly available in Ref. [31].

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Additional details

Related works

Is new version of
Discussion Paper: arXiv:2410.16416 (arXiv)
Is supplemented by
Dataset: https://www.gw-openscience.org/ (URL)

Funding

Science and Technology Facilities Council
State of Niedersachsen/Germany
Max Planck Society
Australian Research Council
European Gravitational Observatory
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare
Dutch Nikhef
National Science Foundation
OAC-2103662
National Science Foundation
PHY-2308881
National Science Foundation
PHY-2011865
National Science Foundation
OAC-2201445
National Science Foundation
OAC-2018299
National Science Foundation
PHY-0757058
National Science Foundation
PHY-0823459
National Science Foundation
PHY-2207728
Eberly College of Science
Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos
Institute for Computational and Data Sciences, Pennsylvania State University

Dates

Accepted
2025-08-26

Caltech Custom Metadata

Caltech groups
LIGO, Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy (PMA)
Publication Status
Published