ASTRON (Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy) is one of the leading radio-astronomical institutes in the world. Its main mission is to make discoveries in radio astronomy happen via the development of new and innovative technologies, the operation of world-class radio astronomy facilities, and the pursuit of fundamental astronomical research. Researchers and engineers at ASTRON have an outstanding international reputation for novel technology development and fundamental research in galactic and extra-galactic astronomy.

DEEP-EST

Within the DEEP-EST project, ASTRON formed part of the application team. DEEP-EST provided new technologies that the researchers incorporated in their radio-astronomical applications. The availability of an OpenCL compiler allowed a complex imaging application to be implemented on FPGAs; this would have been too difficult in a low-level Hardware Description Language. A new GPU technology, called Tensor Cores, results in an 8-fold performance improvement on key signal-processing algorithms like beam forming and correlations.

Website: www.astron.nl