Parallel scientific computing environment for adaptive optic simulations

Abstract

This work is carried out within a research collaboration with the Astronomical Observatory of Arcetri (Florence, Italy) aimed at the development of a parallel version of the adaptive optics simulation software named CAOS (Code for Adaptive Optics System). CAOS is currently used at the Arcetri Observatory to simulate the behaviour of an adaptive optic system, from the atmospheric turbulence corruption to the subsequent adaptive correction made on the wavefronts coming from the astronomical objects onto the pupils of the ground-based telescopes. We describe the computational efforts towards the integration of the CAOS package into a high-performance computing architecture, implementing three different parallelization approaches of a fast fourier transform (FFT)-based CAOS module and discuss the performance using standard performance metrics.

Keywords:

• scientific computing environments
• high-performance computing
• adaptive optics simulations

2000 AMS subject classification :

• 65Y05
• 65Y20
• 68U20
• 85-08

Acknowledgements

The work described was partially supported by the PRIN-MIUR 20030272003 (2003–2005) national project.