Description of MORFEO SRTC physical design and prototyping activities

The Real-Time Computer of the Multi-Conjugate Adaptive Optics Relay module for the ESO Extremely Large Telescope (MORFEO@ELT) is the subsystem that computes the atmosphere tomography based on the wavefront captured by nine sensors and controls the shape of three deformable mirrors. Implementing the MORFEO RTC presents many technical challenges due to the high data throughput generated by the system sensors and the heavy processing power required for the real-time mirrors' shape computation. To meet ESO requirements, the ESO RTC Toolkit will be used to build the soft RTC subsystem, while the Hard RTC will be based on a custom architecture. In this paper, we will discuss some activities undertaken to progress toward the Final Design of the SRTC. Specifically, a physical design is proposed for the MORFEO RTC to meet the computational and network requirements. This design will include both the computing cluster and network physical design. To validate the architecture's functionalities, some prototyping activities have been initiated: Firstly, a subset of the SRTC components has been created to test the main end-to-end data path, i.e. from the source (wavefront sensor) to the permanent storage (telemetry storage), and through the gateway to the consumer data tasks. Additionally, the core and computationally intensive data tasks will be prototyped using simulated data to benchmark different implementation strategies and various hardware solutions. Finally, the distributed system will be prototyped in a virtual or physical environment. These prototyping platforms will be useful in the final design and development stages to test module functionalities and the system and sub-system interfaces.