1 / 13

Deploying Interactive Remote Labs Using the iLab Shared Architecture

Deploying Interactive Remote Labs Using the iLab Shared Architecture. James Hardison, MIT - CECI Frontiers in Education, October 22 - 25, 2008. Motivation for the iLab Project. Laboratory experiences represent an enormous educational value

media
Download Presentation

Deploying Interactive Remote Labs Using the iLab Shared Architecture

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Deploying Interactive Remote Labs Using the iLab Shared Architecture James Hardison, MIT - CECI Frontiers in Education, October 22 - 25, 2008

  2. Motivation for the iLab Project Laboratory experiences represent an enormous educational value Remote labs are a good complement to hands-on experiences But, building a new remote lab from scratch is hard The iLab Project: Provide a standard architecture that eases the development and sharing of remote laboratories.

  3. A Brief History of the iLab Project 2004: iLab Shared Architecture (ISA), Compliant Batched Labs Released 2007: Support for Interactive Experiments Added to ISA 1998: First Individual Labs Developed Adoption of ISA increasing worldwide ►

  4. Benefits of the iLab Shared Architecture Provides a set of generic functions, eases development Provides a standard, distributed platform for lab deployment, eases sharing Enables single sign-on for students who use multiple iLabs Batched iLabs allow certain simplifying assumptions: Communication model Execution model Interactive iLabs are a little more complex…

  5. Supporting Interactive Experiments Interactive experiments, by their nature… …require real-time control. Direct client to lab server connection needed (possibly high-bandwidth, possibly proprietary) …are performed in human-time. Longer periods of single user control A revision to the iLab Shared Architecture was necessary to provide services for interactive experiments.

  6. Topology of Interactive Experiments in the iLab Shared Architecture iLab Service Broker orchestrates access to a set of distributed, stand-alone services for… Experiment Storage Scheduling Cross-service authentication (Ticketing) Service Broker sets up the experiment session and then steps out of the way.

  7. The Experiment Storage Service (ESS) A generic stand-alone service responsible storing student experiment information Lab configurations, input parameters, results Service Brokers, Lab Servers and Clients all interface to an ESS Service Broker responsible for record management Clients & Lab Servers contribute to the record A single ESS may service many iLab installations

  8. Scheduling Services Used to manage student access to the lab. Composed of two complementary services: Lab-side Scheduling Service (LSS) Allocates available lab time to sets of students. User-side Scheduling Service (USS) Reserves blocks of available time for individual student use. Service Brokers manage connections between USS and LSS pairs

  9. Ticketing Provides a common authorization system for systems in the iLab Shared Architecture, based on the following ideas: Service Brokers authenticate users and can permit access to ISA resources by issuing Tickets. Agents seeking access receive only a pointer to the Ticket (Coupon). Only issuing and redeeming agents are able to access Ticket information. Ticketing is used to manage access to all ISA systems.

  10. Developing Interactive Labs for the ISA By design, few technical constraints are placed on lab development Labs can have drastically different requirements One size does not fit all LabVIEW Integrated Interactive Lab Server (LVIILS) Provides a toolkit for building a LabVIEW based lab using the ISA Enables LabVIEW VIs to take full advantage of ISA services Existing VI can be converted to an iLab in a matter of hours Development on other platforms follows similar path to that of the LVIILS

  11. Deployed Interactive iLabs:Force on a Dipole Enables students to observe the behavior of a magnet suspended by a spring between a Helmholtz coil Targeted to freshmen Physics students at MIT Built using LabVIEW and LVIILS Successful test deployment Spring 2008, full scale deployment (~600 students) this Spring.

  12. Deployed Interactive iLabs:Nuclear Reactor Exposes some functionality of the MIT Nuclear Research Reactor A variety of experiments are available in the iLab Also built using LabVIEW To be used in MIT Nuclear Engineering and Physics courses and, eventually, by select secondary schools

  13. Ongoing Work and Conclusions What we’re working on now: Develop a unified architecture that will support both Batched and Interactive iLabs (recently completed). Further refine services for Interactive iLabs on the ISA Support development of Interactive iLabs at Project partner institutions. In conclusion… The iLab Project has developed a platform to support the development and deployment of Interactive remote laboratories. A toolkit has been developed to enable the rapid development of LabVIEW based experiments. This work will drastically increase the number of iLabs available to students. For more information, see http://ilab.mit.edu/wiki

More Related