A parallel source finder framework and Gaussian filter implementation for large radio astronomy spectroscopic data using high performance computing

[Truncated] New radio astronomy telescopes, such as the Australian Square Kilometre Array Path nder (ASKAP), have a larger eld of view and greater resolution than previous instruments. This extra information signifficantly increases the amount of image data produced, up to petabytes in size for an all-sky survey. Surveys that use these telescopes will need to search these large images for galaxies and other sources of emission. Existing source finders, which run on consumer desktop or laptop computers, are unable to process this volume of data at the same speed at which the images are produced. New source finding programs are needed that can use additional processing hardware to perform searches in a reasonable amount of time. It is also desirable to reduce the computational requirements of source finding, such that the processing time saved can be used for more intensive algorithms elsewhere in the survey processing, or to reduce the computational costs of the survey.
This thesis examines the development of a framework for parallel source finders for neutral hydrogen (HI) data, and a parallel source finding program that is capable of searching large spectroscopic images using High Performance Computing (HPC) techniques. Modern HPC hardware consists of a large number of processors connected by a network, and for a program to make use of the processing power available it must be written so that it is able to execute on each processing core. This necessitates writing the program to work in parallel, and efficiently dividing work between the different processors. However, it is non-trivial to create a parallel version of a single-threaded algorithm. In this work I have produced the Source Finder Accuracy Evaluator (SFAE), a program that measures the accuracy of source finders; the Scalable Source Finding Framework (SSoFF), created to ease the development of parallel source finders; and the Parallel Gaussian Source Finder (PGSF), a parallel source finding program developed using SSoFF.