Journal Article

ASTROFLOW: A Real-time End-to-end Pipeline for Radio Single-pulse Searches

Liang, Yuan, Wang, Wei, Lin, Guanhong, Duan, Ran, Ma, Xiaoyun, Zhan, Yingrou, Guo, Meng, Zhou, Dejia, Liu, Fei, Ding, Jialang, Chu, Yuting, Zhang, Jianli, Liu, Liaoyuan, Wang, Zerui, Li, Di, Zhang, Jie, Liu, Menquan, Miao, Chenchen, Qiao, Jing, Wang, Pei, Yan, Xiaohui, Liu, Meng, Wang, Xuanyu

2026

Overview

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are extremely bright, millisecond-duration cosmic transients of unknown origin. The growing number of wide-field and high-time-resolution radio surveys, particularly with next-generation facilities such as the Square Kilometre Array and MeerKAT, will dramatically increase FRB discovery rates, but will also produce data volumes that overwhelm conventional search pipelines. Real-time detection thus demands software that is both algorithmically robust and computationally efficient. We present Astroflow, an end-to-end, GPU-accelerated pipeline for single-pulse detection in radio time–frequency data. Built on a unified C++/CUDA core with a Python interface, Astroflow integrates radio-frequency interference excision, incoherent dedispersion, dynamic-spectrum tiling, and a YOLO-based deep detector. Through vectorized memory access, shared-memory tiling, and OpenMP parallelism, it achieves >10× faster-than-real-time processing on consumer GPUs for a typical 150 s, 2048-channel observation—while preserving high sensitivity across a wide range of pulse widths and dispersion measures. These results establish the feasibility of a fully integrated, GPU-accelerated single-pulse search stack, capable of scaling to the data volumes expected from upcoming large-scale surveys. Astroflow offers a reusable and deployable solution for real-time transient discovery, and provides a framework that can be continuously refined with new data and models.

• Publisher: IOP Publishing
• Subject: Astronomy / Deep learning / Graphics processing units / Observatories / Radio bursts / Radio frequency interference / Real time / Software packages / Tiling