Objective, innovation and impact of the energyefficient DOME MicroDataCenter

The DOM MicroDataCenter, developed by IBM Zurich Research and ASTRON Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, brings together the embedded and data-center computing worlds, resulting in the densest general-purpose computing capability with top energy-efficiency. This paper summarizes the entire 5 year project and illustrates how we went from an initial idea through obtaining funding for our small team and finally to building innovative hard-and software. We explain how we used first-principles from physics to motivate key decisions, highlight some of the practical technical obstacles we needed to overcome and summarize key lessons we learnt along our way. Our result, which we are currently bringing to market through a new startup company, addresses the needs of edgecomputing (analytics) for the Internet of Things, an unforeseen opportunity that emerged during our project.