The Durham ELT adaptive optics simulation platform

TL;DR

This paper introduces a modular, hardware-accelerated adaptive optics simulation platform developed at Durham University, capable of simulating systems for current and future extremely large telescopes with high performance and flexibility.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel, highly parallelizable adaptive optics simulation platform that is modular, object-oriented, and optimized for hardware acceleration, suitable for ELT system design and analysis.

Findings

Successfully simulated a ground layer adaptive optics system

Demonstrated platform's flexibility and high performance

Enabled detailed performance analysis of ELT adaptive optics

Abstract

Adaptive optics systems are essential on all large telescopes where image quality is important. These are complex systems with many design parameters requiring optimisation before good performance can be achieved. The simulation of adaptive optics systems is therefore necessary to categorise the expected performance. This paper describes an adaptive optics simulation platform, developed at Durham University, which can be used to simulate adaptive optics systems on the largest proposed future extremely large telescopes (ELTs) as well as current systems. This platform is modular, object oriented and has the benefit of hardware application acceleration which can be used to improve the simulation performance, essential for ensuring that the run time of a given simulation is acceptable. The simulation platform described here can be highly parallelised using parallelisation techniques suited for adaptive optics simulation, whilst still offering the user complete control while the simulation is running. Results from the simulation of a ground layer adaptive optics system are provided as an example to demonstrate the flexibility of this simulation platform.