IRAM is one of the world’s leading institutes in the design and development of software for radio astronomy.

The enormous stream of astronomical and instrumental data delivered by IRAM’s facilities is one of the major challenges for the institute’s IT experts and needs specific and innovative software solutions that are developed in-house at IRAM. During the last 40 years, the IRAM computer specialists have pioneered control, monitoring and data acquisition software for radio facilities, their instruments and their receiver systems.

Highly specialized software

The institute’s IT specialists also provide the highly specialized software for designing, simulating, drawing, developing and testing new hardware in the institute’s different laboratories. Furthermore, they are in charge of the powerful workstations for calibrating, reducing and analysing astronomical data as well as producing images based on that data. To archive large volumes of astronomical data, the Computer Group uses two mirrored DellEMC Isilon clusters that provide a highly efficient, massively scalable, and secure disk-based archive that protects IRAM data for long-term retention.

Protecting IRAM’s unique know-how

Besides R&D, the group carefully monitors IRAM’s cybersecurity, takes care of the institute’s communication tools (email, chat, video-conference, document sharing, issues tracker, etc.) and maintains a help-desk service for the whole IRAM staff.

The IT specialists at IRAM use mainly Free/Libre Open-Source Software (FLOSS) for the institute’s IT infrastructure. This particular choice preserves above all the institute’s digital sovereignty and its unique know-how.