The COMPASS team is engaged in several international collaborations covering various aspects of the project.
COMPASS is used as a testbed in a phase A study of options for the real time control of the adaptive optics of an ELT instrument as sub-system or module led by ESO and in collaboration with the University of Durham and TNO. In this study, LESIA is responsible for the assessment of the multi-GPU technology and its applicability to the various components of a RTC : hard real-time and soft-real-time.
The purpose of this collaboration was to carry out a first assessment of the suitability of the APEnet+ network adapter design as an interconnect at various levels of the design of a GPU-based solution for the Real-Time Controller (RTC) of an Adaptive Optics (AO) system. This study is part of a more general collaboration between LESIA and INFN aiming at developing the next generation 10GbE interconnect supporting PCIe gen3 and based on APEnet+ with versatility in mind.
In the context of the COMPASS project, the team at LESIA, Observatoire de Paris has developed a strong collaboration with the Extreme Computing Research Center (ECRC) at KAUST. Bridging HPC and astronomical instrumentation has led us to propose innovative and efficient solutions to the most challenging simulation problems in the context of the instruments design to find the proper trade-off between cost and achievable scientific performance. We are now leading a pilot study, drawing the lines for a longer term research program focusing on efficient pipelined data processing and visualization strategies for AO.