Accelerating global parameter estimation of gravitational waves from Galactic binaries using a genetic algorithm and GPUs
Stefan H. Strub, L. Ferraioli, Cédric Schmelzbach, Simon C. Stähler, Domenico Giardini
Abstract
The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) is a planned space-based gravitational wave telescope with the goal of measuring gravitational waves in the millihertz frequency band, which is dominated by millions of Galactic binaries. While some of these binaries produce signals that are loud enough to stand out and be extracted, most of them blur into a confusion foreground. Current methods for analyzing the full frequency band recorded by LISA to extract as many Galactic binaries as possible and to obtain Bayesian posterior distributions for each of the signals are computationally expensive. We introduce a new approach to accelerate the extraction of the best fitting solutions for Galactic binaries across the entire frequency band from data with multiple overlapping signals. Furthermore, we use these best fitting solutions to omit the burn-in stage of a Markov chain Monte Carlo method and to take full advantage of graphics processing unit (GPU)-accelerated signal simulation, allowing us to compute posterior distributions in 2 s per signal on a laptop-grade GPU.