Real-time implementation of an iterative solver for atmospheric tomography

Abstract: The image quality of the new generation of earthbound Extremely Large Telescopes (ELTs) is heavily influenced by atmospheric turbulences. To compensate these optical distortions a technique called adaptive optics (AO) is used. Many AO systems require the reconstruction of the refractive index fluctuations in the atmosphere, called atmospheric tomography. The standard way of solving this problem is the Matrix Vector Multiplication, i.e., the direct application of a (regularized) generalized inverse of the system operator. However, over the last years the telescope sizes have increased significantly and the computational efficiency become an issue. Promising alternatives are iterative methods such as the Finite Element Wavelet Hybrid Algorithm (FEWHA), which is based on wavelets. Due to its efficient matrix-free representation of the underlying operators, the number of floating point operations and memory usage decreases significantly. In this paper, we focus on performance optimization techniques, such as parallel programming models, for the implementation of this iterative method on CPUs and GPUs. We evaluate the computational performance of our optimized, parallel version of FEWHA for ELT-sized test configurations.