ClusterVision Delivers Powerful GPU Cluster at ASTRON

AMSTERDAM & WESTERBORK, Netherlands - Jan. 20, 2018 - PRLog -- ClusterVision, Europe's dedicated specialist in high performance computing solutions, has announced the successful completion of a new high performance computing GPU cluster system for the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON). The 2 PFLOPS installation, codenamed ARTS, will be used to assist the institute's Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope with analysing and deciphering large pulsar flashes.

As part of the APERTIF project, ASTRON has installed new high-speed cameras on the telescopes to better capture the pulsar flashes. To be able to process the large amounts of data these cameras will capture, the institute was looking for a state of the art HPC solution that would satisfy all their needs. ClusterVision designed a GPU based cluster that is able to process all this data. By employing a large number of GPU nodes, data from the telescopes could be processed much faster and way more precisely.

Furthermore, by utilising the deep learning capabilities a GPU cluster brings to the table, the telescopes will be able to detect pulsar flashes with much greater accuracy through self-learning. In the past, ASTRON scientists had to manually detect and input pulsar patterns. With deep learning, ARTS does it for them.

As one of the country's most advanced HPC installations and the most powerful GPU based supercomputer of the Netherlands, ARTS has attracted widespread attention from the media. Public television news programme EenVandaag will feature the ARTS cluster and its use cases in their Saturday episode. See how HPC and ClusterVision have enabled ASTRON to advance their scientific discovery on 20 January, 2018 at 18:15 (CEST) on NPO1.

About ASTRON
ASTRON, part of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), is the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy. ASTRON's goal is to make discoveries in radio astronomy happen. ASTRON provides front-line observing capabilities for its own astronomers in-house, and for the wider national/ international community. The institute expects this strategy to regularly result in astronomical discoveries that significantly influence our understanding of the content, the structure and the evolution of the Universe.

About ClusterVision
ClusterVision specialises in high performance computing (HPC) solutions. We design, build, manage and support supercomputers and HPC software.

By combining cutting-edge hardware and software components with a range of customised professional services and a highly-skilled engineering team, ClusterVision creates for its customers the most efficient, technologically-forward, and reliable HPC solutions. Our solutions stand out from the HPC crowd because every installation is tailor-fit around the customer's needs and wants.