Servizio Instrument ed astratti strumento quadro
- InstrumentService and AVL
- AbstractInstrumentFramework and AVL**
** AVL requires the installation of Ascom Platforms for the use of the telescope.
The goal of this Thesis-project is the creation of a software system for secure sharing and aggregation of data acquisition tools, geographically distributed, for engineering and scientific applications. To do this, was choosen the technology made available by computational grids “web service-based” using the software Globus-toolkit Toolkit 4″.
The use of grid technology to control instruments for acquisition and retrieve the data implies the need of develop a standard methodology of interface between the different types of hardware. During the development of the thesis-project has been implemented the framework AbstractInstrument (AIF), used for virtualization of the instruments, through the use of standard interfaces that provide a high level of interation, common to all instruments. Thanks to this approach, any instrument can be hadled through a device driver of hight level.
To manage a virtualized instrument through a computational grid, was developed, using the Globus Toolkit version 4 (GT4), developed by the Mathematics and Computer Science Division of the Argonne National Laboratory (MCS / ANL) and the Computation Institute of the European university of Chicago (UOC-CI), scientific institutions of global relevance which are ongoing collaboration, the secure grid-web-service Instrument Service (IS) which, through the functionality offered from the AIF allows access, control and sharing of tools across the virtualized Grid. The IS can interface any instrument to the grid automatically publishing it on the Index Service, standard component of GT4, the metadata relating to each instrument and eventually the values of the current measure acquired by the sensors. This feature, fully configured configurable in terms of information published, allows the Resource Broker Service (RBS), a component developed at the Department of Applied Sciences, to search tools as well as other grid resources through a query written with the description language resource ClassAd, used by Condor and by gLite and considered the de facto standard in this type of applications.
In order to show what is actually possible by using the components developed, was realized a Virtual laboratory dedicated to astronomical applications (AVL). AVL actually supports robotic telescopes and weather stations that can be used in applications of computational grid integrating also other components such as services for the distribution of multidimensional environmental-data.