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.

Date Published: 4 August 2014
PDF: 9 pages
Proc. SPIE 9148, Adaptive Optics Systems IV, 91484B (4 August 2014); doi: 10.1117/12.2055092

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9148:
Adaptive Optics Systems IV
Enrico Marchetti; Laird M. Close; Jean-Pierre Véran, Editor(s)