Launch of ECLAT

Launch of the ECLAT laboratory

Damien Gratadour appointed Director of ECLAT

At its first meeting, the ECLAT steering committee appointed Mr Damien Gratadour (CNRS) as ECLAT director and approved the Paris Observatory’s request to join the partnership.

Built as a centre of excellence in high-performance computing and artificial intelligence technologies and techniques for astronomical instrumentation, ECLAT will unite the efforts of the 14 associated laboratories and teams around a common roadmap. The aim is to facilitate the R&D partnerships needed to design and build future cyber-physical systems for astronomy, capable of ingesting, processing and reducing very large volumes of data.

SKAO, the first mission

The SKA research infrastructure, an ambitious international project to develop the world’s largest radio observatory, will be the first project to be undertaken by this joint laboratory.

France’s official membership to the SKAO intergovernmental organisation, in charge of building and operating two telescopes, SKA-MID in South Africa and SKA-LOW in Australia, provided the initial impulse for the creation of ECLAT. SKA is the astronomy use case that, to date, has mobilised the most French expertise in the fields of computing and data logistics: extreme data flows, complexity and variety of the anticipated computing flows, high-performance requirements and data transport, storage and distribution solutions, etc.

This first project aims to bring together the French academic and industrial teams who will contribute to the design of the observatory’s data processing systems at the two sites.

A common roadmap

ECLAT’s roadmap is built around four pillars:

1. 1. Instrumentation for astronomy, which will be the foundation on which all the developments essential to the definition of research projects will be built.
   2. The design of supercomputers, which will include sizing and design studies for the systems to be delivered, including prototyping and deployment, as well as a link with infrastructure design activities (buildings, energy production).
   3. Research & development, which will encompass all work enabling system architects to push back the technical and technological boundaries in order to achieve the objectives of minimising construction and ownership costs, and maximising energy efficiency.
   4. The contribution to SKAO, which will cover activities that not only form part of the current effort to build the observatory but also promote new and innovative French contributions.

ECLAT is a laboratory without walls, of national scope, based from the outset on a network of strong collaborations and large-scale projects at national and European level. The 14 laboratories and teams are affiliated to the following research organisations and universities, which are signatories to the agreement to create this joint laboratory: CNRS, INRIA, Eviden, Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur, Observatoire de Paris, INSA Rennes, Université de Rennes, Université Paris-Saclay and CentraleSupélec.