COMPASS: An Efficient GPU-based Simulation Software for Adaptive Optics Systems

For ground-based astronomical telescopes, Image resolution is directly dependent on aperture diameter. Practically however, atmospheric turbulence disturbs incoming wavefronts and sets dramatic limitations on imaging quality, which issue led to using Adaptive Optics (AO) systems to compensate wavefront disturbance and achieve optimal resolution. With the arrival of Extremely Large Telescopes, with aperture diameter above 20 meters, High Performance Computing (HPC) techniques are required to simulate and operate AO systems. With the advent of General Purpose Graphics Processing Units (GPGPU), many-core architectures of GPUs can be leveraged to accelerate AO simulation software. COMPASS (COMputing Platform for Adaptive opticS System) is an end-to-end AO simulation soft¬ware based upon Nvidia's Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) toolkit. Simulations performed on state-of-the-art Nvidia DGX-1 servers equipped with 8 Tesla V100-SXM2 and Dual 20- core Intel Xeon E5-2698 v4 show a speed up factor of up to 362 as compared to YAO, a feature-equivalent software with multi¬threaded CPU architecture. The COMPASS implementation ensures compatibility with any Nvidia architecture. A speed up by 5 was measured between a DGX-1 and a comparable server with 6-year old GPUs, with no line of code changed.