A GPU-COMPUTING APPROACH TO SOLAR STOKES PROFILE INVERSION

Abstract

We present a new computational approach to the inversion of solar photospheric Stokes polarization profiles, under the Milne-Eddington model, for vector magnetography. Our code, named GENESIS, employs multi-threaded parallel-processing techniques to harness the computing power of graphics processing units (GPUs), along with algorithms designed to exploit the inherent parallelism of the Stokes inversion problem. Using a genetic algorithm (GA) engineered specifically for use with a GPU, we produce full-disk maps of the photospheric vector magnetic field from polarized spectral line observations recorded by the Synoptic Optical Long-term Investigations of the Sun (SOLIS) Vector Spectromagnetograph (VSM) instrument. We show the advantages of pairing a population-parallel GA with data-parallel GPU-computing techniques, and present an overview of the Stokes inversion problem, including a description of our adaptation to the GPU-computing paradigm. Full-disk vector magnetograms derived by this method are shown using SOLIS/VSM data observed on 2008 March 28 at 15:45 UT.