Kenneth Mighell (National Optical Astronomy Observatory)
Keywords: Astronomy
Abstract:
Many astronomical image analysis tasks are based on algorithms that can be described as being embarrassingly parallel – where the analysis of one subimage generally does not affect the analysis of another subimage. Yet few parallel-processing astrophysical image-analysis programs exist that can easily take full advantage of today’s fast multi-core servers costing a few thousands of dollars. One reason for the shortage of state-of-the-art parallel processing astrophysical image-analysis codes is that the writing of parallel codes has been perceived to be difficult. I describe a new fast parallel-processing image-analysis program called CRBLASTER which does cosmic ray rejection using van Dokkum’s L.A.Cosmic algorithm. CRBLASTER is written in C using the industry standard Message Passing Interface library. Processing a single 800 x 800 Hubble Space Telescope Wide-Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) image takes 1.9 seconds using 4 processors on an Apple Xserve with two dual-core 3.0-GHz
Intel Xeons; the efficiency of the program running with the 4 cores is 82%. The code has been designed to be used as a software framework for the easy development of parallel-processing image-analysis programs using embarrassing parallel algorithms; all that needs to be done is to replace the core image processing task (in this case the C function that performs the L.A.Cosmic algorithm) with an alternative image analysis task based on a single processor algorithm. I describe the design and implementation of the program and then discuss how it could possibly be used to quickly do time-critical analysis applications such as those involved with space surveillance or do complex calibration tasks as part of the pipeline processing of images from large focal plane arrays.
Date of Conference: September 16-19, 2008
Track: Astronomy