Computer simulations and real-time control of ELT AO systems using graphical processing units

Abstract

The adaptive optics (AO) simulations at the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) have been carried out using the effi- cient, C based multi-threaded adaptive optics simulator (MAOS, http://github.com/lianqiw/maos). By porting time-critical parts of MAOS to graphical processing units (GPU) using NVIDIA CUDA technology, we achieved a 10 fold speed up for each GTX 580 GPU used compared to a modern quad core CPU. Each time step of full scale end to end simulation for the TMT narrow field infrared AO system (NFIRAOS) takes only 0.11 second in a desktop with two GTX 580s. We also demonstrate that the TMT minimum variance reconstructor can be assembled in matrix vector multiply (MVM) format in 8 seconds with 8 GTX 580 GPUs, meeting the TMT requirement for updating the reconstructor. We also benchmarked applying MVM in GPUs and got 1.7 ms end-to-end latency with 7 GTX 580 GPUs.