The Planck Sky Model (PSM) is a global representation of the multi-component sky at frequencies ranging from a few GHz to a few THz. It summarizes in a synthetic way as much of our present knowledge as possible of the GHz sky. PSM is a complete and versatile set of programs and data that can be used for the simulation or the prediction of sky emission in the frequency range of typical CMB experiments, and in particular of the Planck sky mission. It was originally developed as part of the activities of Planck component separation Working Group (or "Working Group 2" - WG2), and of the ADAMIS team at APC.

PSM gives users the opportunity to investigate the model in some depth: look at its parameters, visualize its predictions for all individual components in various formats, simulate sky emission compatible with a given parameter set, and observe the modeled sky with a synthetic instrument. In particular, it makes possible the simulation of sky emission maps as could be plausibly observed by Planck or other CMB experiments that can be used as inputs for the development and testing of data processing and analysis techniques.

ARKCoS (Accelerated radial kernel convolution on the sphere) efficiently convolves pixelated maps on the sphere with radially symmetric kernels with compact support. It performs the convolution along isolatitude rings in Fourier space and integrates in longitudinal direction in pixel space. The computational costs scale linearly with the kernel support, making the method most beneficial for convolution with compact kernels. Typical applications include CMB beam smoothing, symmetric wavelet analyses, and point-source filtering operations. The software is written in C++/CUDA and provides two independent code paths to do the necessary computation either on conventional hardware (CPUs), or on graphics processing units (GPUs).