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 the sCMOS cameras 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 computation must move to where the data is produced and resides.
To meet these demands, Light Bridges has developed the ICR (Indefeasible Computer Right®)—a standardized software solution developed in the Canaries that combines high-speed flash storage with access to advanced GPUs. Hosted in Tenerife, the ICR-Astronomy® infrastructure is directly linked to both the telescopes and the image storage systems. This architecture enables astronomers to access and process data with unprecedented speed and efficiency, allowing them to work remotely at high performance while downloading the final results or fully processed data
The ICR is a highly versatile and scalable product. It supports virtual machines, Jupyter notebooks, and other widely used astronomical tools. Access 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.
