Meeting the real-time challenges of ground-based telescopes using low-rank matrix computations

Abstract

Adaptive Optics (AO) is a technology that permits to measure and mitigate the distortion effects of atmospheric turbulence on optical beams. AO must operate in real-time by controlling thousands of actuators to shape the surface of deformable mirrors deployed on ground-based telescopes to compensate for these distortions. The command vectors that trigger how each individual actuator should act to bend a portion of the mirror are obtained from Matrix-Vector Multiplications (MVM). We identify and leverage the data sparsity structure of these control matrices coming from the MAVIS instruments for the European Southern Observatory s Very Large Telescope. We provide performance evaluation on x86 and accelerator-based systems. We present the impact of tile low-rank (TLR) matrix approximations on time-to-solution for the MVM and assess the produced image quality. We achieve performance improvement up to two orders of magnitude for TLR-MVM compared to regular dense MVM, while maintaining the image quality.