The work performed during the first reporting period (mid-term) addressed the first two main research areas through prototyping activities.
The main results can be outlined as follows:
- prototyping several multi-accelerator based solution for an AO RTC at the E-ELT scale, based on the latest generation of GPUs and Intel manycore processors. Performance assessment on both the real-time data pipeline, with predictable performance at the level of 10s of µs, and the supervisor module with a throughput above 30 TFLOP/s
- development of a smart interconnect concept using QuickPlay, supporting 10G TCP/UDP and PCIe gen 3, and hosting various features including protocol handling, data processing and pear-to-pear access on the PCIe bus. Support for about 10 various FPGA boards including µXComp
- design study of two FPGA boards: µXComp and µXLink, based on the Arria 10 technology and demonstrating two main features of newer generations of FPGA technologies, respectively the HMC high bandwidth memory and the embedded ARM HPS on the SoC version of the chip. A first µXComp board was delivered and full hardware testing was conducted
- implementation of a real-time simulator solution including two operational modes from the hard real-time rate to decimated, high precision rate. Dedicated interfaces have been designed and the full software stack is operational
- assessment of several solutions in the ecosystem: mathematical libraries (cuBLAS, MAGMA) and programming frameworks (custom deterministic, Chameleon) for the data pipeline and the supervisor, middleware solutions (DDS, ZeroMQ, MPI) between the various sub-systems and an integrated FPGA development environment (QuickPlay)
In terms of publications, the project has already produced 3 proceedings to the SPIE conference on astronomical telescopes in June 2016:
- Gratadour et al, for an overview of the project
- Perret et al, for the interconnect prototyping
- Ferreira et al, for the simulations and error budget
Additionally, a number of contributions are expected at the AO4ELT5 conference in June 2017 (Gratadour et al., Perret et al., Bernard et al., Ferreira et al., Doucet et al., Reeves et al., Vidal et al.).
Finally, two workshops were organized in Paris during the first reporting period about real-time control for AO (RTC4AO3 and RTC4AO4).The partners have contributed significantly to the workshop with 4 presentations at RTC4AO3 and 9 presentations at RTC4AO4.
