The traditional readout system for Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors (MKID) often utilized Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) for nearly all its digital processing tasks. However, the cost of such FPGA development is high and the design must be conducted carefully to fit the limited FPGA resource. To cope with this challenge, a hybrid readout system emerged as a viable solution, integrating both FPGA and CPU/GPU components. In this configuration, the FPGA handles the hard real-time and high-throughput processing, while a soft CPU/GPU sub-system receives the phase data and executes more sophisticated algorithms. Details of this FPGA firmware and the corresponding CPU/GPU system software developed at Durham University will be presented.
The next generation of adaptive optics (AO) systems have chosen the pyramid wavefront sensor (PWFS) that is renowned for its performance in closed-loop AO. With the advent of the extremely large telescope era, it is essential to investigate methods to enhance PWFS performance further. Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors (MKID) are photon-counting devices that record the arrival time and energy of each incident photon. They offer new capabilities beyond those of existing detectors and can significantly improve AO performance. This project aims to demonstrate how the use of an MKID can improve PWFS performance to meet the demanding requirements of an ELT instrument through simulation, laboratory tests and finally an on-sky demonstration. Here we introduce the project, presenting preliminary simulation results and detailing the optical bench.
HARMONI is the first light visible and near-IR integral field spectrograph for the ELT. It covers a large spectral range from 450 nm to 2450 nm with resolving powers from 3500 to 18000 and spatial sampling from 60 mas to 4 mas. It can operate in two Adaptive Optics modes - SCAO (including a High Contrast capability) and LTAO - or with NOAO. The project is preparing for Final Design Reviews. HARMONI is a work-horse instrument that provides efficient, spatially resolved spectroscopy of extended objects or crowded fields of view. The gigantic leap in sensitivity and spatial resolution that HARMONI at the ELT will enable promises to transform the landscape in observational astrophysics in the coming decade. The project has undergone some key changes to the leadership and management structure over the last two years. We present the salient elements of the project restructuring, and modifications to the technical specifications. The instrument design is very mature in the lead up to the final design review. In this paper, we provide an overview of the instrument's capabilities, details of recent technical changes during the red flag period, and an update of sensitivities.
MATTO (Multi-conjugate Adaptive Techniques Test Optics) is a wide-field adaptive optics test bench, under development at the INAF-Astronomical Observatory of Padova, with the goal of supporting the study and development of new Multi-Conjugated Adaptive Optics techniques. Hence, it has been designed to be flexible and composed of independently configurable modules. The DAO4MATTO Real-Time Control system will be a system-tailored implementation of DAO, the new RTC software solution developed at Durham University, that will interface with and control several devices with different purposes. After a short presentation of the main concepts of MATTO, we briefly discuss the hardware and software architecture of DAO4MATTO. Furthermore, we show some preliminary findings obtained in a closed-loop scenario for a basic prototype system, composed of two visible wavelength cameras, a Shack Hartmann wavefront sensor and a deformable mirror.
ERIS is a new Adaptive Optics (AO) instrument installed at the Cassegrain focus of VLT-UT4 in January 2022 and led by a Consortium of Max-Planck Institut fuer Extraterrestrische Physik, UK-ATC, ETH-Zurich, NOVA-Leiden, ESO and INAF. The ERIS AO system provides NGS mode to deliver high contrast correction and LGS mode to extend high Strehl performance to large sky coverage. The AO module includes one 40x40 LGS wavefront sensor (WFS), one NGS WFS able to switching between 40x40 and 4x4 configuration, the related optics to relay the telescope beam and a dedicated SPARTA real time computer running the AO loop up to 1kHz. The AO module, with the 1170-actuator Deformable Secondary Mirror and the Laser Facility from VLT-AOF, provides AO correction to the high resolution coronagraphic imager NIX (1-5um) and the IFU spectrograph SPIFFIER (1-2.5um). In this paper we briefly review the ERIS AO system design and we present preliminary AO results of the ongoing commissioning, started in February 2022.
HARMONI is the first light, adaptive optics assisted, integral field spectrograph for the European Southern Observatory’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT). A work-horse instrument, it provides the ELT’s diffraction limited spectroscopic capability across the near-infrared wavelength range. HARMONI will exploit the ELT’s unique combination of exquisite spatial resolution and enormous collecting area, enabling transformational science. The design of the instrument is being finalized, and the plans for assembly, integration and testing are being detailed. We present an overview of the instrument’s capabilities from a user perspective, and provide a summary of the instrument’s design. We also include recent changes to the project, both technical and programmatic, that have resulted from red-flag actions. Finally, we outline some of the simulated HARMONI observations currently being analyzed.
KEYWORDS: Adaptive optics, Real-time computing, Performance modeling, Optical instrument design, Control systems, Control systems design, Computing systems, Modeling, Large telescopes
The adaptive optics systems for the next generation of extremely large telescopes have in some cases exceeded the capabilities of single computers and servers. The next generation of real-time control systems for these adaptive optics systems often consist of multiple “nodes” connecting into a real-time system, with supplementary computers which optimise and supervise the real-time loop. In this presentation we will give an overview of the approach we are taking to the HARMONI Adaptive Optics control system. We will describe the approach we have taken in designing, modelling, and building a real time control system for this scale of instrument.
ERIS is the new AO instrument for VLT-UT4 led by a Consortium of Max-Planck Institut fuer Extraterrestrische Physik, UK-ATC, ETH-Zurich, NOVA-Leiden, ESO and INAF. The ERIS AO system provides NGS mode to deliver high contrast correction and LGS mode to extend high Strehl performance to large sky coverage. The AO module includes NGS and LGS wavefront sensors and, with VLT-AOF Deformable Secondary Mirror and Laser Facility, will provide AO correction to the high resolution coronagraphic imager NIX (1-5um) and the IFU spectrograph SPIFFIER (1-2.5um). In this paper, we present the final design of the ERIS AO system and the status of the of current MAIV phase.
The Enhanced Resolution Imager and Spectrograph (ERIS) is a next-generation, adaptive optics assisted, near-IR imager and integral field spectrograph (IFS) for the Cassegrain focus of the Very Large Telescope (VLT) Unit Telescope 4. It will make use of the Adaptive Optics Facility (AOF), comprising the Deformable Secondary Mirror (DSM) and the UT4 Laser Guide Star Facility (4LGSF). It is a rather complex instrument, with its state of the art AO system and two science channels. It is also meant to be a "workhorse" instrument and offers many observation modes. ERIS is being built by a Consortium of European Institutes comprising MPE Garching (D), ATC (UK), ETH Zürich (CH), Leiden University (NL) and INAF (I) in collaboration with ESO. The instrument passed Final Design Review in mid-2017 and is now in the MAIT phase. In this paper we describe the design of the ERIS Instrument Software (INS), which is in charge of controlling all instrument functions and implementing observation, calibration and maintenance procedures. The complexity of the instrument is reflected in the architecture of its control software and the number of templates required for operations. After a brief overview of the Instrument, we describe the general architecture of the ERIS control network and software. We then discuss some of the most interesting aspects of ERIS INS, like the wavefront sensors function control, AO secondary loops, IFS quick-look processing and the on-line processing for high-contrast imaging observations. Finally, we provide some information about our development process, including software quality assurance activities.
Adaptive optics is essential for the successful operation of the future Extremely Large Telescopes (ELTs). At the heart of these AO system lies the real-time control which has become computationally challenging. A majority of the previous efforts has been aimed at reducing the wavefront reconstruction latency by using many-core hardware accelerators such as Xeon Phis and GPUs. These modern hardware solutions offer a large numbers of cores combined with high memory bandwidths but have restrictive input/output (I/O). The lack of efficient I/O capability makes the data handling very inefficient and adds both to the overall latency and jitter. For example a single wavefront sensor for an ELT scale adaptive optics system can produce hundreds of millions of pixels per second that need to be processed. Passing all this data through a CPU and into GPUs or Xeon Phis, even by reducing memory copies by using systems such as GPUDirect, is highly inefficient.
The Mellanox TILE series is a novel technology offering a high number of cores and multiple 10 Gbps Ethernet ports. We present results of the TILE-Gx36 as a front-end wavefront sensor processing unit. In doing so we are able to greatly reduce the amount of data needed to be transferred to the wavefront reconstruction hardware. We show that the performance of the Mellanox TILE-GX36 is in-line with typical requirements, in terms of mean calculation time and acceptable jitter, for E-ELT first-light instruments and that the Mellanox TILE series is a serious contender for all E-ELT instruments.
We present wavefront reconstruction acceleration of high-order AO systems using an Intel Xeon Phi processor. The Xeon Phi is a coprocessor providing many integrated cores and designed for accelerating compute intensive, numerical codes. Unlike other accelerator technologies, it allows virtually unchanged C/C++ to be recompiled to run on the Xeon Phi, giving the potential of making development, upgrade and maintenance faster and less complex. We benchmark the Xeon Phi in the context of AO real-time control by running a matrix vector multiply (MVM) algorithm. We investigate variability in execution time and demonstrate a substantial speed-up in loop frequency. We examine the integration of a Xeon Phi into an existing RTC system and show that performance improvements can be achieved with limited development effort.
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