Fast simulation of the NICER instrument

摘要

The NICER mission uses a complicated physical system to collect information from objects that are, by x-ray timing science standards, rather faint. To get the most out of the data we will need a rigorous understanding of all instrumental effects. We are in the process of constructing a very fast, high fidelity simulator that will help us to assess instrument performance, support simulation-based data reduction, and improve our estimates of measurement error. We will combine and extend existing optics, detector, and electronics simulations. We will employ the Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) to parallelize these calculations. The price of suitable CUDA-compatible multi-gigaflop cores is about $0.20/core, so this approach will be very cost-effective.