SOAP-GPU: Spectral time series simulations with GPU

SOAP-GPU is a revision of SOAP 2 (ascl:1504.021), which simulates spectral time series with the effect of active regions (spot, faculae or both). In addition to the traditional outputs of SOAP 2.0 (the cross-correlation function and extracted parameters: radial velocity, bisector span, full width at half maximum), SOAP-GPU generates the integrated spectra at each phase for given input spectra and spectral resolution. Additional capabilities include fast spectral simulation of stellar activity due to GPU acceleration, simulation of more complicated active region structures with superposition between active regions, and more realistic line bisectors, based on solar observations, that varies as function of mu angle for both quiet and active regions. In addition, SOAP-GPU accepts any input high resolution observed spectra. The PHOENIX synthetic spectral library are already implemented at the code level which allows users to simulate stellar activity for stars other than the Sun. Furthermore, SOAP-GPU simulates realistic spectral time series with either spot number/SDO image as additional inputs. The code is written in C and provides python scripts for input pre-processing and output post-processing.