Scalable Dark Siren Cosmology with gwcosmo: GPU Acceleration, Validation and Systematics
astro-ph.CO, gr-qc
Submitted: 2026-05-22
Updated: 2026-09-15
Journal ref: Phys. Rev. D, 114, (2026), 063528
DOI: 10.1103/53c5-mtk5
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: As the number of confident gravitational-wave detections grows, population-level hierarchical analyses face increasing computational costs.
Terminology
Abstract
As the number of confident gravitational-wave detections grows, population-level hierarchical analyses face increasing computational costs. Dark-siren cosmological inference integrates over the localisation volume of each gravitational-wave source. To remain feasible without discarding information from the quieter but more numerous sources in the catalogue, significant efficiency improvements are vital for analysis pipelines. In this work, we present an upgraded version of the cosmological inference pipeline gwcosmo, which leverages vectorisation on graphics processing units to process the entire gravitational-wave catalogue in parallel with each iteration. This new implementation achieves a speed-up of 1000 times over the previous version, facilitating analyses of O5-like numbers of GW events on wall-clock timescales of hours. Our results demonstrate the scalability of the gwcosmo pipeline, specifically its ability to handle the increasing computational load of expanding event catalogues, positioning it as a vital tool for future advances in dark-siren cosmology.
Sources
- Using gravitational-wave standard sirens
- Unveiling the Universe with Emerging Cosmological Probes
- Exploring short gamma-ray bursts as gravitational-wave standard sirens
- Jumping the gap: searching for LIGO's biggest black holes
- Heavy Black-Holes Also Matter in Standard Siren Cosmology
- Gravitational Radiation, Inspiraling Binaries, and Cosmology
- A novel approach to infer population and cosmological properties with gravitational waves standard sirens and galaxy surveys
- Advanced LIGO
- Advanced Virgo: a 2nd generation interferometric gravitational wave detector
- GWTC-4.0: Updating the Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog with Observations from the First Part of the Fourth LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Observing Run
- Joint cosmological and gravitational-wave population inference using dark sirens and galaxy catalogues
- ICAROGW: A python package for inference of astrophysical population properties of noisy, heterogeneous and incomplete observations
- GWTC-4.0: Constraints on the Cosmic Expansion Rate and Modified Gravitational-wave Propagation
- Growing Pains: Understanding the Impact of Likelihood Uncertainty on Hierarchical Bayesian Inference for Gravitational-Wave Astronomy
- PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library
- Bilby: A user-friendly Bayesian inference library for gravitational-wave astronomy
- Importance nested sampling with normalising flows
- GWTC-4.0: Population Properties of Merging Compact Binaries
- Measurement of the Hubble constant using the Dark Energy Survey Year 6 Gold galaxy catalogue and the fourth Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalogue
- Compact Binary Coalescence Sensitivity Estimates with Injection Campaigns during the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaborations' Fourth Observing Run
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