SPARTA Upgrade is the obsolescence project to upgrade an old legacy SPARTA hard-real time box by the modern technology HW and innovated SW using new standards and advanced technics.

The project was triggered by the red flag from ESO RTC development team raising the awareness that some of the Paranal SPARTA systems might not fulfill the lifetime of their instruments lifetime (AOF GALACSI, ERIS and etc.) due to the increase failure rate of their HW. The development was inspired by the ELT technology development program, where it was demonstrated that the new modern CPU based servers can provide sufficient performance results, improving the maintenance by using off-the-shelf HW and mitigating the obsolescence issues.

The project development includes the upgrade of the I/O HW to the new modern PCIe cards maintaining sFPDP interface to the existing WFS cameras and DSM, keeping the interface to the soft real-time SPARTA coprocessing cluster unmodified, but replacing the underlying SW of the hard real-time control processing core with two socket AMD based CPU server. Together with the HW upgrade the modern technologies and SW technics were introduced as well like PTP, 10Gb Ethernet, lock-free programming, new C++ standards features and etc.

This new development was also propagated to the new instruments requiring the modern RTC in the timeline of the new VLT instruments like GRAVITY+, where the RTC is based on the SPARTA Upgrade.

Pavel Shchekaturov,  ESO