Prototyping AO RTC using emerging high performance computing technologies with the Green Flash project

Abstract

The Green Flash initiative responds to a critical challenge in the astronomical community. Scaling up the real-time control solutions of AO instruments in operation to the specifications of the AO modules at the core of the next generation of extremely large telescopes is not a viable option. The main goal of this project is to design and build a prototype for an AO RTC targeting the E-ELT first-light AO instrumentation. We have proposed innovative technical solutions based on emerging technologies in High Performance Computing, assessed this enabling technologies through prototyping and are now assembling a full scale demonstrator to be validated with a simulator and eventually tested on sky. In this paper, we report on downselection process that led us to the final prototype architecture and the performance of our full scale prototype obtained with a real-time simulator. Show more