NI Labview receives HPC recognition

For the competition, the NI Labview research and development team submitted a technical paper establishing multicore programming benchmarks in developing real-time control for the forthcoming European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT).

The Analytics Challenge was held in conjunction with SC08, the international conference on high-performance computing, networking, storage and analysis.

Each year, the Analytics Challenge provides a forum for researchers and industry representatives to present solutions that embody all facets of high-performance computing.

For their Analytics Challenge submission, National Instruments engineers documented their breakthrough work with the European Southern Observatory (ESO) on the E-ELT project, which is currently in the proof-of-concept phase and, when constructed, will be the world's largest telescope ever created.

The ESO needed help to prove the viability of a commercial off-the-shelf solution for controlling the two most complex mirrors within the E-ELT, which will have a total of five mirrors.

The telescope's primary active mirror will be 42m in diameter and will comprise 984 hexagonal mirror segments, all of which must be in strict alignment continuously, even in windy conditions.

To maintain mirror segment alignment, the control system must respond to a total of 6,000 sensor inputs and then send control signals to 3,000 actuators, and it must complete this input-output cycle up to 1,000 times per second.

To solve this problem, NI engineers used the multicore programming functionality of Labview real-time to create a highly deterministic, hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) communication network that moves 36Mbytes of data per second.

The benchmarks achieved included distributing control algorithms on up to eight cores simultaneously and performing a 3,000 by 6,000 matrix-vector multiplication within 0.5ms.

This meets a monumental computational challenge while maintaining the determinism required in real-time applications and breaking the 1ms closed-loop threshold.

The team also documented its work on the even larger problem of developing control for the telescope's 2.5m active mirror, which will comprise a thin, flexible mirror membrane spread across 8,000 actuators.

Instead of maintaining alignment, this mirror will adapt and deform to compensate for waveform aberrations caused by atmospheric disturbances.

The computational requirements for controlling this mirror are nearly 15 times more complex than that of the large primary mirror.

NI engineers determined that this problem could be solved only by using a state-of-the-art multicore blade system.

They tested their solution on the Dell M1000, a 16-blade system in which each blade machine features eight cores.

Although the solution is still in progress, the results from the Dell system have concluded that Labview has effectively distributed the control problem onto 128 cores.