A Parallelized Gravitational Wave Detection Pipeline For Pulsar Timing Arrays

Pulsar Timing Array (PTA) experiments are reporting high-significance measurements of excess low-frequency noise that is statistically consistent across many pulsars and independent datasets. While the data are not yet informative enough to measure the definitive evidence of gravitational waves (GW) in the form of spatial correlations between pulsars, it may be a matter of only a couple of years. As existing pulsars are timed for longer, and new pulsars are incorporated into our datasets, the data volume will continue to expand and throttle the speed of our existing detection pipelines. I will describe a radically new approach to PTA data analysis that parallelizes the GW inference over each pulsar and pieces the results together in post-processing. This renders the measurement of a GW amplitude, its signal-to-noise ratio, and cross-validation statistics, all much faster to compute by several orders of magnitude. I will describe current usage of this new pipeline in flagship analyses, and the prospects for it to be generalized even further.