Acceleration of AO simulation using programmable logic

摘要

Numerical Simulation is an essential part of the design and optimisation of astronomical adaptive optics systems. Simulations of adaptive optics are computationally expensive and the problem scales rapidly with telescope aperture size, as the required spatial order of the correcting system increases. Practical realistic simulations of AO systems for extremely large telescopes are beyond the capabilities of all but the largest of modern parallel supercomputers. Here we describe a more cost effective approach through the use of hardware acceleration using field programmable gate arrays. By transferring key parts of the simulation into programmable logic, large increases in computational bandwidth can be expected. We show that the calculation of wavefront sensor images (involving a 2D FFT, photon shot noise addition, background and readout noise), and centroid calculation can be accelerated by factor of 400 times when the algorithms are transferred into hardware. We also provide details about the simulation platform and framework that we have developed at Durham.