COSMIC: a real-time platform for signal processing pipelines

Abstract

The incoming giant class of telescopes, led by the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), is a turning point for ground-based optical astronomy. Building instruments able to operate in this next generation is challenging from many points of view, scientifically as well as technologically. Those instruments will need Adaptive Optics (AO) systems to compensate for the atmospheric turbulence impact on the observations, and those systems' complexity also reaches summits at this scale. Especially, the computational complexity coupled with strong hard real-time requirements and a need for high modularity and robustness make it challenging, bringing the need for disruptive developments. In this paper, we present the COSMIC platform developed for building efficient and modular AO real-time pipelines. The reference architecture is presented, and 2 different AO use cases at different scales are considered for the performance benchmark. Results show strong hard real-time capabilities, already fulfilling the need coming with this new generation of giant telescopes.