COMPASS COMputing Platform for Adaptive optics SystemS

The European Southern Observatory is leading the design phases for the European-Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT), a 39m diameter telescope, to provide Europe with the biggest eye on the universe ever built, with a first light foreseen in 2022. The E-ELT will be the first telescope that will entirely depend, for routine operations, on adaptive optics (AO), an instrumental technique for the correction of dynamically evolving aberrations in an optical system, used on astronomical telescopes to compensate, in real-time, for the effect of atmospheric turbulence.

The PHASE partnership (Partenariat Haute Résolution Angulaire Sol et Espace), gathering most of French AO community is one of the core contributors to the AO modules. The COMputing Platform for Adaptive optics SystemS (COMPASS) shall provide the PHASE community with powerful means to lead the development of these AO modules. Based on a total integration of software with hardware and relying on a high performance heterogeneous architecture, based on GPUs as accelerators and using commodity components, the COMPASS platform is used to perform end-to-end simulations of the AO system behavior and performance as well as to design and test new concepts for the Real-Time Computer (RTC), a core component of any AO system. It also provides critical decision tools for optimizing the opto-mechanical design of the instruments that will be developed for the E-ELT.

The main objective of the COMPASS project is to provide a full scale end-to-end AO development platform to the PHASE community, able to address the E-ELT scale and including a real-time core that can be directly integrated on a real system. Additionally, one of the key topics of this project is the development of a prototype for a high speed, low latency, image acquisition and processing system dedicated to AO systems and fully integrated in the simulation framework. The goal of the COMPASS project is to lead developments along four main axis : AO modeling, real-time control for AO, low-latency image acquisition and E-ELT instruments design.

This project federates the efforts of various teams with complementary expertise from high performance computing (Maison de la Simulation) to adaptive optics systems and astrophysics around a high performance development platform. Spin-offs in each of these domains are expected from such a multi-disciplinary collaboration.