As astronomy becomes increasingly data-intensive, the challenges of transferring and processing this information have grown in parallel. In the past, astronomical images were just a few megabytes in size, making it feasible to download and analyze them locally. Today, however, each image captured by FERVOR-L and FERVOR-M, the sCMOS instruments at the TTT and TST observatory can exceed 600 MB—and astronomers often need sequences of images taken every second to study short-lived phenomena. Moving the data to the astronomer is no longer practical; instead, the storage and computation hardware must move to where the data is produced and resides.
To meet these demands, Light Bridges, in collaboration with ASTRO POC, has developed the ICR (Indefeasible Computer Right®)—a standardized IT product, formally classified by the Canary Islands Tax Authority as a delivery of goods. Produced industrially in the archipelago, the ICR has the status of a Canary tangible good. It combines high-speed flash storage with access to advanced GPUs and is supplied in standardized physical form.
Hosted in Tenerife, the ICR-Astronomy® infrastructure is directly linked to the telescopes and the image storage systems. This architecture enables astronomers to access and process data with unprecedented speed and efficiency, working remotely at high performance while downloading the final results or fully processed data. The product’s standardized and tangible nature has already been validated in R&D projects, consolidating its status as a computational asset with recognized patrimonial value.
The ICR is a highly versatile and scalable product. It supports virtual machines, Jupyter notebooks, and other widely used astronomical tools. Access to the hardware is secured via SSH and requires prior VPN configuration.
The following articles will walk you through the steps to configure your VPN and connect to the ICR environment.
