The Durham adaptive optics real-time controller

TL;DR

The paper presents the development and performance evaluation of the Durham adaptive optics real-time controller, a versatile, hardware-accelerated CPU-based system suitable for 8m class telescopes with low latency and jitter.

Contribution

It introduces a modern, hardware-accelerated real-time control system for adaptive optics, capable of supporting large telescopes with high performance.

Findings

Latency and jitter less than 10 microseconds

Supports hardware acceleration with FPGAs and GPUs

Suitable for all planned 8m class telescope adaptive optics systems

Abstract

The Durham adaptive optics real-time controller was initially a proof of concept design for a generic adaptive optics control system. It has since been developed into a modern and powerful CPU based real-time control system, capable of using hardware acceleration (including FPGAs and GPUs), based primarily around commercial off the shelf hardware. It is powerful enough to be used as the real-time controller for all currently planned 8~m class telescope adaptive optics systems. Here we give details of this controller and the concepts behind it, and report on performance including latency and jitter, which is less than 10~$\mu$s for small adaptive optics systems.