Grid Control of Astronomical Instrumentation

1. Grid for control ofAstronomical Instrumentation C. Vuerli, G.Taffoni, F. Pasian INAF – National Institute of Astrophysics, Italy ASPERA Workshop Lyon – 8 October 2010 1

2. Goal • Gridification of Telescopes and more in general of astronomical instrumentation to remotely monitor, control and process data in quasi-real-time • Remote monitoring of telemetry and of scientific data under acquisition • Remote control: astronomers interact with astronomical instrumentation to drive the acquisition data process • Quasi-real-time data processing: acquisition of data and a first processing of them is performed simultaneously ASPERA Workshop Lyon – 8 October 2010 2

3. Rationale • Astronomical Observing facilities produce very large data sets • Access to Grid infrastructures make possible the on-line processing of data as it requires considerable computing power and storage capacity • Technological advances of astronomical instrumentation takes place frequently and usually implies enhancements of the volumes of produced data • A more efficient collaboration between astronomers and their convenient access to the research facilities could improve the quality of astronomical research ASPERA Workshop Lyon – 8 October 2010 3

4. Rationale • It is highly desirable a better exploitation of astronomical instrumentation to tackle dead times due to adverse conditions for scheduled observations • Costs could dramatically decrease given that astronomers do not have to travel to remote observing facilities ASPERA Workshop Lyon – 8 October 2010 4

5. The targeted Integrated System DBMS SE IE QE Grid-UI CE The GRID IE DBMS QE CE CE Grid-GUI SE ASPERA Workshop Lyon – 8 October 2010 5

6. The “DYNACORE” Ancestor • An EU funded project to provide scientists and astronomers with a powerful tool for remote collaboration in experiments or observations requiring one or more remote facilities. • One of the main objectives was the development of a teleoperation system which can be easily adapted and optimized for a particular instrument. ASPERA Workshop Lyon – 8 October 2010 6

7. User/User Interaction Virtual Operations Room User/Instrument Interaction Virtual Laboratory DYNACOREServer DYNACOREServer Instrument/Instrument Interaction

8. The GRID.IT Project • GRID.IT: National multi-disciplinary project to validate the Italian Grid infrastructure • INAF participated with 3 applications • Access to Astronomical Databases via Grid • Porting on Grid the VST Pipelines • Monitoring/Control of astronomical instrumentation ASPERA Workshop Lyon – 8 October 2010 8

9. ICSManager ICS plug-in ICS specific driver ICSProcess Instrument Control System ICS G-DSE and G-ICS GIS GRAM gatekeeper MDS GRIS ldif JobManager QueryManager Ldap Scheduler p-in query plug-in Grid Providers (snmp) Query DB specific driver Pbs/LSF JobProcess QueryProcess RDBMS RDBMS ASPERA Workshop Lyon – 8 October 2010 9

10. LCG-2: DB + ICS enabled middleware Application level services User interfaces Applications EU DataGrid +Glite + G-DSE + G-ICS “Collective” services App monitoring system Resource Broker Data management VDT (Condor, Globus, GLUE) + XMLDB + XMLICS “Basic” services User access Information system Information schema Data transfer Security PBS, Condor, LSF,… MySQL Ora, etc. NFS, … System software Scientific Linux File system RDBMS Local scheduler ICS Operating system HPSS, CASTOR… Hardware Instruments Computing cluster Network resources Data storage ASPERA Workshop Lyon – 8 October 2010 10

11. ODBC Manager ICSC Manager DSE Instance Man ICS Instance Man ODBC Driver ICSC Driver DSE Instance ICS Instance DSE ICS Tel CS User DB Synchro Synchro CS Internal DB ICS Grid Access Enabled Gridinfosystem Grid Instrument Control System GRAM Protocol Job Manager MDS Local Resource Manager snmpd LDAP snmpd GANGLIA Worker Node Meta Machine ASPERA Workshop Lyon – 8 October 2010 11

12. What about QE and IE? • Some development for QE continued at INAF (after an unsuccessful EC project proposal) through some national (INAF) funded projects and a prototype for G-DSE was implemented • The development of IE instead was frozen and never resumed due to lack of funds ASPERA Workshop Lyon – 8 October 2010 12

13. What opportunities now? • DORII (Deployment of Remote Instrumentation Infrastructure) builds on experience gained in previous European projects (in particular GridCC) • Designs and sets up an extended infrastructure with involvement of users in three main areas (Earthquake, Environmental Sciences, Experimental Sciences) ASPERA Workshop Lyon – 8 October 2010 13

14. DORII • The DORII e-Infrastructure is mainly based on the EGEE (and now on EGI) infrastructure and on gLite middleware • To deal with the interactivity requirements of the applications, the DORII e-Infrastructure integrates a selection of services built by the Interactive European Grid Project (int.eu.grid) • The gLite middleware offers the main grid services such as information, job management, data management and security control ASPERA Workshop Lyon – 8 October 2010 14

15. DORII Architecture The users and the instruments interact via the Instrument Element The VCR is a Grid portal which enables registered users to interactively access the DORII Grid resources The g-Eclipse framework provides tools that customize Grid user applications, manage Grid resources and support the development cycle of new software applications To access all the resources and services of the DORII e-nfrastructure, a suitable Common Library will be soon available ASPERA Workshop Lyon – 8 October 2010 15

16. The Instrument Element (IE) • The Instrument Element (IE) represents the virtualization of the scientific data sources, mainly digital instrumentation and sensors • IE is implemented as an open source Java middleware that handles the tasks of remote control and safe access to the instrumentation. In particular, it handles the tasks of • user authentication and authorization • remote operations • concurrent access to devices • locking and reservation of instrumentation during an experiment • publishing of alarms and events generated by the instrumentation • monitoring of the device variables • a simple connection to the Glite's Grid resources. ASPERA Workshop Lyon – 8 October 2010 16

17. The IE Architecture ASPERA Workshop Lyon – 8 October 2010 17

18. The Instrument Element (IE) • The IE has been introduced as a novel grid component • through the QE+IE project proposal • In the context of the GRIDCC project, and by the end of the project it has been deployed in a number of pilot applications • The two models of IE differ from the point of view of architecture and implementation. From the functional point of view they are similar ASPERA Workshop Lyon – 8 October 2010 18

19. The Instrument Element (IE) • IE exposes to the outside world a web service interface that integrates the Glite's authentication module based on the delegation of the client's X509 proxy certificates • The delegated proxy is further used to access the traditional grid resources, in particular the Storage Elements • The actual device, or rather its control system, is linked to the middleware through a protocol adapter called the Instrument Manager (IM) ASPERA Workshop Lyon – 8 October 2010 19

20. The Instrument Manager (IM) • An IM consists of a set of Java classes and a single XML description file that fully describes the device • An instrument is described by • its state machine • transactions • regular commands • attributes (variables) • operating parameters. • The XML device descriptor is used by the developer to list the commands, attributes, parameters, initial and final states, input and output types, measurement units, attribute, parameter value boundaries, etc. ASPERA Workshop Lyon – 8 October 2010 20

21. More about the IE • The IE offers the support for saving the instrumentation output directly to the remote grid storage or uploading of some parameters to the device from the remote grid storage using the Grid-FTP protocol • Instrument variables (attributes) may be monitored • synchronously (through the polling mechanism) • Asynchronously (more efficient) using the Java Message System (JMS). JMS is also used to publish the alarms generated by the device or the events that occurred during the operations • IE allows for the plugging of the scientific instrumentation into a complex data processing workflow pipeline consisting of traditional grid resources like storage capacities and processing power in a safe and standardized manner • IE also allows for remote operations and monitoring even of complex equipments ASPERA Workshop Lyon – 8 October 2010 21

22. The Virtual Control Room • The Virtual Control Room is an open source Grid portal based on Gridsphere and Web 2.0 technologies. Easy discovering, browsing and using GLite Grid resources are its most significant features • Upon registration, the VCR allows its users to safely create a long term proxy certificates on their VO's MyProxy server. From that moment on, the VCR becomes a SSO portal to the Grid. As users log in with their username and password, short term (usually 12-hour) proxy certificates are created. Such certificates are then used for authentication at VO's computing and storage resources. • The VCR allows users to easily access resources of the underlying middleware and to exploit its services. ASPERA Workshop Lyon – 8 October 2010 22

24. The Virtual Control Room • VCR is a front end to the Instrument Element (IE) thus allowing for remote control of the scientific instrumentation and adopting the same security scheme (proxy delegation) as for the storage and computing resources • SSL tunneling allows users to safely access the not yet gridified devices or complex legacy instruments • VCR is also a collaborative environment that offers a set of groupware tools in support of a scientific teamwork. Tools include an e-logbook, an integrated chat, a wiki-like help system and people, and resource browsers • VCR integrates with the third party tools like Skype • VCR may be adopted as a ready-to-use virtual collaboratory or as an extendible framework for developing advanced, application-specific collaboratories. A set of libraries are provided with the VCR software development kit that supports the implementation of application-specific plug-ins ASPERA Workshop Lyon – 8 October 2010 24

26. The RISGE-RG in OGF • The RISGE (Remote Instrumentation Services in Grid Environment) RG aims at bringing together various existing approaches in defining remote access interfaces to sophisticated laboratory equipment, as well as to come up with use cases that can dictate the requirements for integrating scientific instruments with the Grid. • One of the purposes of this group is to bring together people involved in the field of remote instrumentation to document experiences, identify best practices and develop informational documents. ASPERA Workshop Lyon – 8 October 2010 26

27. References • The IE and the VCR in GridCC and DORII have been developed at ELETTRA SCpA operating the Synchrotron Radiation Machine in Trieste, Italyhttp://www.elettra.trieste.it Roberto Pugliese roberto.pugliese@elettra.trieste.it ASPERA Workshop Lyon – 8 October 2010 27

28. References • http://www.gridcc.org/viewnote.php?id=1812 • http://www.dorii.eu • RINGrid project (remote instrumentation)http://www.ringrid.eu • Interactive Europran Grid projecthttp://www.i2g.eu/ • g-Eclipse project (software frameworks for application developers)http://www.geclipse.org/ • http://forge.gridforum.org/sf/projects/risge-rg ASPERA Workshop Lyon – 8 October 2010 28

29. End of Presentation ASPERA Workshop Lyon – 8 October 2010 29