What is TipTop?

To facilitate the prediction and estimation of Adaptive Optics (AO; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_optics) performance, we have developed a fast and versatile algorithm called TipTop, which provides the expected AO Point Spread Function (PSF) for any existing AO observing mode — Single-Conjugate AO, Laser-Tomographic AO, Multi-Conjugate AO, or Ground-Layer AO — and for any set of atmospheric conditions.

The TipTop tool takes its roots in an analytical approach, where the simulations are done in the Fourier domain. This allows to reach a very fast computation time (few seconds per PSF with GPU acceleration), and efficiently explore the wide parameter space.
TipTop has been developed in Python, taking advantage of previous work developed in different languages, and unifying them in a single framework.