Swinburne University of Technology Professor, Karl Glazebrook, and his team have helped to develop a new Real Time Controller (RTC) for the W. M. Keck Observatory (WMKO), located on Mauna Kea, Hawaii.
The RTC is the heart of the Adaptive Optics (AO) system for the twin Keck Telescopes – a technology that allows ground-based telescopes to measure and counteract (in real time) the turbulence present in the Earth’s atmosphere, sharpening up an image to match the resolution possible from orbital telescopes. The Keck’s AO system is essential for obtaining observation results from between 70 to 100 nights per year, with the the twin Keck telescopes serving a broad international community of astronomers, from the likes of the University of California and Caltech, to NASA and other space organisations.
While AO systems have been used on the Keck for several decades, it was determined that a new RTC was required, one with much greater computational throughput. The collaboration involving Professor Glazebrook and his team eventuated after the head of AO at the Keck Observatory visited Swinburne to discuss their proven expertise in computational science and supercomputers. After Professor Glazebrook was introduced to another group at the University of Paris, who had been developing GPU based AO algorithms, a collaboration was formed between these two institutions – along with Australian National University (ANU) and an Italian company called Microgate (who created the timing systems for the existing RTC and led the project overall) – submitting a design for a new RTC in response to Keck’s call for proposals.
A new RTC would have to be as flexible as possible in order to perform regular system updates, something that the existing AO system was unable to manage efficiently. Hence the computational speed, software expertise and timing precision of the design offered by their collaboration was sufficient to make the team successful bidders. Microgate led the overall project and developed the ‘Interface Module’ hardware that communicated with all the AO sensors and actuators. Swinburne led the effort to create the ‘Computational Engine’ in collaboration with the ANU and Paris Adaptive Optics groups. The Computational Engine is a high end custom Linux server with twin NVIDIA V100 GPUs that executes a custom adaptive optics pipeline, based on code developed by Paris’ GreenFlash project. For the project, Swinburne’s expertise in high performance software pipelines (from SKA heritage) were highly complemented by ANU’s expertise in AO algorithms and systems in developing and deploying an integrated, functioning system.
For their part of the project, Swinburne was greatly assisted by the experts from ADACS, who provided a depth of software engineering expertise that was vital to the success of the project, with a specialist programmer assigned specifically to work on the project.
