6,764 research outputs found
Integrating Existing Software Toolkits into VO System
Virtual Observatory (VO) is a collection of interoperating data archives and
software tools. Taking advantages of the latest information technologies, it
aims to provide a data-intensively online research environment for astronomers
all around the world.
A large number of high-qualified astronomical software packages and libraries
are powerful and easy of use, and have been widely used by astronomers for many
years. Integrating those toolkits into the VO system is a necessary and
important task for the VO developers.
VO architecture greatly depends on Grid and Web services, consequently the
general VO integration route is "Java Ready - Grid Ready - VO Ready". In the
paper, we discuss the importance of VO integration for existing toolkits and
discuss the possible solutions. We introduce two efforts in the field from
China-VO project, "gImageMagick" and " Galactic abundance gradients statistical
research under grid environment". We also discuss what additional work should
be done to convert Grid service to VO service.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures, will be published in SPIE 2004 conference
proceeding
The H.E.S.S. central data acquisition system
The High Energy Stereoscopic System (H.E.S.S.) is a system of Imaging
Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes (IACTs) located in the Khomas Highland in
Namibia. It measures cosmic gamma rays of very high energies (VHE; >100 GeV)
using the Earth's atmosphere as a calorimeter. The H.E.S.S. Array entered Phase
II in September 2012 with the inauguration of a fifth telescope that is larger
and more complex than the other four. This paper will give an overview of the
current H.E.S.S. central data acquisition (DAQ) system with particular emphasis
on the upgrades made to integrate the fifth telescope into the array. At first,
the various requirements for the central DAQ are discussed then the general
design principles employed to fulfil these requirements are described. Finally,
the performance, stability and reliability of the H.E.S.S. central DAQ are
presented. One of the major accomplishments is that less than 0.8% of
observation time has been lost due to central DAQ problems since 2009.Comment: 17 pages, 8 figures, published in Astroparticle Physic
Spectroscopic Analysis in the Virtual Observatory Environment with SPLAT-VO
SPLAT-VO is a powerful graphical tool for displaying, comparing, modifying
and analyzing astronomical spectra, as well as searching and retrieving spectra
from services around the world using Virtual Observatory (VO) protocols and
services. The development of SPLAT-VO started in 1999, as part of the Starlink
StarJava initiative, sometime before that of the VO, so initial support for the
VO was necessarily added once VO standards and services became available.
Further developments were supported by the Joint Astronomy Centre, Hawaii until
2009. Since end of 2011 development of SPLAT-VO has been continued by the
German Astrophysical Virtual Observatory, and the Astronomical Institute of the
Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. From this time several new features
have been added, including support for the latest VO protocols, along with new
visualization and spectra storing capabilities. This paper presents the history
of SPLAT-VO, it's capabilities, recent additions and future plans, as well as a
discussion on the motivations and lessons learned up to now.Comment: 15 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication in Astronomy &
Computin
Data Provenance and Management in Radio Astronomy: A Stream Computing Approach
New approaches for data provenance and data management (DPDM) are required
for mega science projects like the Square Kilometer Array, characterized by
extremely large data volume and intense data rates, therefore demanding
innovative and highly efficient computational paradigms. In this context, we
explore a stream-computing approach with the emphasis on the use of
accelerators. In particular, we make use of a new generation of high
performance stream-based parallelization middleware known as InfoSphere
Streams. Its viability for managing and ensuring interoperability and integrity
of signal processing data pipelines is demonstrated in radio astronomy. IBM
InfoSphere Streams embraces the stream-computing paradigm. It is a shift from
conventional data mining techniques (involving analysis of existing data from
databases) towards real-time analytic processing. We discuss using InfoSphere
Streams for effective DPDM in radio astronomy and propose a way in which
InfoSphere Streams can be utilized for large antennae arrays. We present a
case-study: the InfoSphere Streams implementation of an autocorrelating
spectrometer, and using this example we discuss the advantages of the
stream-computing approach and the utilization of hardware accelerators
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