SOAP-GPU: Efficient Spectral Modelling of Stellar Activity Using Graphical Processing Units

Abstract

Stellar activity mitigation is one of the major challenges for the detection of earth-like exoplanets in radial velocity (RV) measurements. Several promising techniques are now investigating the use of spectral time-series, to differentiate between stellar and planetary perturbations. In this paper, we present a new version of the Spot Oscillation And Planet (SOAP) 2.0 code that can model stellar activity at the spectral level using graphical processing units (GPUs). We take advantage of the computational power of GPUs to optimise the computationally expensive algorithms behind the original SOAP 2.0 code. We develope GPU kernels that allow to model stellar activity on any given wavelength range. In addition to the treatment of stellar activity at the spectral level, SOAP-GPU also includes the change of spectral line bisectors from center to limb, and can take as input PHOENIX spectra to model the quiet photosphere, spots and faculae, which allow to simulate stellar activity for a wide space in stellar properties. Benchmark calculations show that for the same accuracy, this new code improves the computational speed by a factor of 60 compared with a modified version of SOAP 2.0 that generates spectra, when modeling stellar activity on the full visible spectral range with a resolution of R=115'000. Although the code now includes the variation of spectral line bisector with center to limb angle, the effect on the derived RVs is small. The publicly available SOAP-GPU code allows to efficiently model stellar activity at the spectral level, which is essential to test further stellar activity mitigation techniques working at the level of spectral timeseries not affected by other sources of noise. Besides a huge gain in performance, SOAP-GPU also includes more physics and is able to model different stars than the Sun, from F to K dwarfs, thanks to the use of the PHOENIX spectral library.

Accepted for publication in A&A

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