NSF-Swift / satellite-overhead

An open-source tool for calculating satellite interference to radio astronomy observations.
https://pypi.org/project/sopp/
GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
0 stars 2 forks source link

Add multiprocessing for satellite position calculations #82

Closed 0xeb-bp closed 1 year ago

0xeb-bp commented 1 year ago

We've introduced multiprocessing for the satellite position calculations to reduce program runtime. Depending on the number of cores available on the computer, this optimization can lead to substantial time savings.

Before implementing multiprocessing, the program's runtime was approximately equal to the duration of the observation window (when using CelesTrak's satellite data). For instance, a one-hour observation window would take about an hour to complete.

After conducting tests, we found that a four-core computer reduced the runtime by nearly half. On a 20-core computer, the one-hour observation window took approximately 12 minutes to complete.