Simulations of present day space-borne observatories are an indispensable tool for mission preparation, design trade-off, and to maximise the overall scientific mission yield. Aimed to discover Earth-Sun planetary analogs for the first time and exploring the occurrence and architecture of planetary systems, the ESA PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars (PLATO) space mission heavily relies on such realistic end-to-end simulations. Designed for the purpose, PlatoSim, the end-to-end PLATO simulator developed at KU Leuven, is an essential software tool for performance studies as simulations are carried out in the time domain and at pixel level. Boosting PlatoSim's capabilities with High Performance Computing (HPC), a new setup allows realistic on-board photmetric time series with duration of years to be computed within minutes. Indeed also being a tool for scientific discoveries, HPC for PlatoSim will be pivotal for future simulations for the Consortium.

{"references": ["http://ivs-kuleuven.github.io/PlatoSim3/index.html", "https://www.vscentrum.be/", "https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2021/09/aa40717-21/aa40717-21.html", "https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2020/12/The_colour_of_the_sky_from_Gaia_s_Early_Data_Release_3", "https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/abs/2019/07/aa35269-19/aa35269-19.html", "https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~lkreidberg/batman/", "https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2015PASP..127.1161K/abstract"]}

Contact: Nicholas Jannsen Email: nicholas.jannsen@kuleuven.be Part of the research leading to these results has received funding from the KU\,Leuven Research Council (grant C16/18/005: PARADISE) and from the BELgian federal Science Policy Office (BELSPO) through PRODEX grant PLATO.