Hello Planet KDE — my name is Henry de Valence, and I’ll be doing a GSOC project this summer for KStars. The main goal of the project is to rewrite the astronomy engine in KStars so that it runs much more efficiently and in parallel.
Right now, the code that handles all of the astronomical calculations for KStars is quite messy and inefficient. It all runs in the main thread, uses angular coordinates that require trigonometry to work with, and works on little bits of data scattered around memory (instead of processing contiguous arrays all at once).
My goal is to take this code, and reimplement it using OpenCL. I’m hoping to get to the point where we can run KStars with the USNO NOMAD catalog (2 GB of stars) on low-end machines, and maybe open up the performance possibility to implement PPMXL (40 GB) in the future.
Stay tuned!