Fast simulation of the NICER instrument

John P. Doty; Matthew P. Wampler-Doty; Gregory Y. Prigozhin; Takashi Okajima; Zaven Arzoumanian; Keith Gendreau

doi:10.1117/12.2232511

18 July 2016 Fast simulation of the NICER instrument

John P. Doty, Matthew P. Wampler-Doty, Gregory Y. Prigozhin, Takashi Okajima, Zaven Arzoumanian, Keith Gendreau

Proceedings Volume 9905, Space Telescopes and Instrumentation 2016: Ultraviolet to Gamma Ray; 99054V (2016) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2232511
Event: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2016, Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Abstract

The NICER¹ mission uses a complicated physical system to collect information from objects that are, by x-ray timing science standards, rather faint. To get the most out of the data we will need a rigorous understanding of all instrumental effects. We are in the process of constructing a very fast, high fidelity simulator that will help us to assess instrument performance, support simulation-based data reduction, and improve our estimates of measurement error. We will combine and extend existing optics, detector, and electronics simulations. We will employ the Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA²) to parallelize these calculations. The price of suitable CUDA-compatible multi-giga op cores is about $0.20/core, so this approach will be very cost-effective.

Citation Download Citation

John P. Doty, Matthew P. Wampler-Doty, Gregory Y. Prigozhin, Takashi Okajima, Zaven Arzoumanian, and Keith Gendreau "Fast simulation of the NICER instrument", Proc. SPIE 9905, Space Telescopes and Instrumentation 2016: Ultraviolet to Gamma Ray, 99054V (18 July 2016); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2232511

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