At the core of extreme scale telescopes operations is adaptive optics (AO) which requires the control, at the millisecond rate, of deformable mirrors with thousands of degrees of freedom. This is the role of the real-time controller (RTC), one of the core component of any AO module. To ensure adequate turbulence compensation, hence the stability of the system, the RTC computation time must be deterministic at the level of tens of microseconds, and the latency in data transfers between the sensors, the computing cores and the deformable optics should be minimal. To build this critical component of the telescope operations, the astronomical community is facing technical challenges, emerging from the combination of high data transfer bandwidth, low latency and high throughput requirements. Meeting the specifications of these real-time multi-sensors data-intensive computing facilities, to be installed on a remote site and to be operated continuously over several years, involves addressing three strategic topics in high performance computing systems design:
- optimize the balance between processors performance, memory capacity and data access between sensors, compute nodes and storage, with deterministic performance
- design and implement efficient computing schemes addressing the concurrency and locality challenges
- build modular, scalable and resilient systems
While the final design phase of ELTs instruments design is starting, this dedicated workshop, as a follow-up to the Durham 2011, ESO Garching 2012 and the Paris early 2016 AO RTC workshops, aims at gathering the community around topics such as (but not limited to):
- computation hardware present and future
- platforms including real-time and non real-time
- software implementation and optimization of real-time control / supervision algorithms
- software standards and middleware
- RTC hardware and software co-design to maximize performance and stability
- interfaces to cameras, deformable mirrors and internal network interconnect
strategy - user interface and system operation
- performance assessment and system testing
- system engineering / current status of present / future instruments
Sponsored by the CIAS of Observatoire de Paris.
Invited speakers :
- Enrico Marchetti (ESO)
- Pierre Kestener (CEA / Maison de la Simulation)
- Hatem Ltaief (ECRC, KAUST)
- Philippe Thierry (Intel)
- François Courteille (NVIDIA)
- Laurent Vanel (IBM)
- Roberto Biasi (Microgate)
- ...
