Enabling technologies for GPU driven adaptive optics real-time control

Driving adaptive optics (AO) systems with thousands of degrees of freedom in real-time is one of the major challenges faced by the astronomical community for the design of the next generation of giant telescopes such as the E-ELT, the TMT or the GMT. PRANA (Prototype Real-time Architecture for the Next generation Ao) is a pathfinder for a reliable, scalable and energy efficient GPU-based AO real-time controller able to target the extremely large telescopes case. We will discuss the challenges in driving the next generation AO in real-time, give a detailed description of the demonstrator and present the first benchmarks obtained in the lab.