Driven by the ELT requirements, AO RTC at ESO has shifted from dedicated hardware platforms towards networked, time-synchronized, high-performance computing systems. Enabling CPU platforms and software paradigms were initially prototyped within a external contract with FORCE Technology in 2018-2020 and demonstrated to scale up to the ELT MCAO size. Since then, the core techniques have been further evolved at ESO and applied to new projects such as the VLT SPARTA Upgrade and the ELT Wave Front RTC. Common approaches and tools are being developed across ESO projects to maximize performance determinism on CPU platforms.

These include streamlining OS and network tuning, resource affinity, recurrent lockless scenarios, performance verification on-the-wire, etc. This talk presents the main drivers for the new AO RTC paradigm adopted by ESO, its evolution since the initial prototyping and the core technologies currently in place. The performance envelope attainable so far is summarized, along with the current approach to performance verification and observability.

Possible future evolution and obsolescence concerns are discussed.

Marcos Suárez Valles, ESO