Speaker
Describe the added value of the Grid for the scientific/technical activity you (plan to) do on the Grid. This should include the scale of the activity and of the potential user community and the relevance for other scientific or business applications
People maintaining observing facilities (telescopes and related instrumentation)
may resort to G-ICS enabled Grids to support the concepts of remote
monitoring/control without the need of developing dedicated systems from their
own. The Grid already supplies the underlying technology, once a Grid node is
installed at the observing facility and the astronomer has access to a Grid-UI.
There are no limitation on the number of telescopes and/or instruments a single
G-ICS enabled Grid can support. Any observing facility, moreover, may be
gridified in this way, provided that a Grid driver is written for the specific
telescope and/or instrument, so the G-ICS may be beneficial for a huge
community of users distributed worldwide. G-ICS allows the porting in Grid any
kind of scientific instruments (i.e. networks of sensors) and this makes it
suitable not only for astronomers but for any other scientific community and to
carry out tasks like the environment quality monitoring.
Describe the scientific/technical community and the scientific/technical activity using (planning to use) the EGEE infrastructure. A high-level description is needed (neither a detailed specialist report nor a list of references).
The G-ICS is relevant for astronomers who use (or plan to use) the Grid to run
remote observations from their home Institutes making use of remote
observing facilities (Telescopes and related instrumentation). The G-ICS allows
to configure the astronomical instrumentation as a new embedded resource in
Grid. Astronomers may submit jobs to accomplish tasks like retrieving scientific
and telemetric data under acquisition in quasi-real-time and sending requests
to change the instrumentation status.
Report on the experience (or the proposed activity). It would be very important to mention key services which are essential for the success of your activity on the EGEE infrastructure.
To support the remote monitoring/control of astronomical (but more generally
scientific) instrumentation, a Grid infrastructure must be G-ICS enabled, that is
the underlying middleware was modified in some of their components, mainly
the GRAM and the GIS. The GRAM is extended in a way that the Job Manager is
joined by a ICSC (Instrument Control System Connector) Manager that takes
charge of jobs whose target is the remote monitoring/control of
instrumentation. The ICSC Manager activates when needed a specific ICS
instance for any instrument to monitor/control. Being instruments a new
resource of the Grid like a CPU or a storage space, a set of meta-data
characterizing this kind of resource have to be defined and fed to the GIS so
that users are able to discover instrument resources via the RB. The solution
proposed for instruments is similar to what has been done for databases in
Grid. Some work was already done on LCG-based Grids; we plan to port the
same solution in gLite too.
With a forward look to future evolution, discuss the issues you have encountered (or that you expect) in using the EGEE infrastructure. Wherever possible, point out the experience limitations (both in terms of existing services or missing functionality)
The current version of the EGEE Grid middleware does not support instruments
as embedded resources in Grid, but the porting of the G-ICS in the current LCG-
based production Grid and in gLite is in our planning. We don’t expect particular
problems from this point of view. At present however it is difficult for us to say
whether and when the G-ICS technology might be ported on the EGEE Grid
infrastructure.
