Taking Advantage of Cloud Solutions to Balance Requests in an Astrophysical Data Center

A complete astrophysical publishing environment, working as a helper system for an astrophysical data center, requires various components, from custom data back ends up to more or less standardized (e.g. Virtual Observatory driven) front end solutions. Combining this environment into one framework can lead to a potentially non scalable or hardly improvable system. In this contribution we describe what we are planning and developing to take advantage of cloud computing infrastructures and of a modular/distributed component architecture to provide a scalable and maintainable publishing environment at the Italian center for Astronomical Archives (IA2) at the INAF (Italian National Institute for Astrophysics) Astronomical Observatory of Trieste. Using a set of modular services, connected by registered interfaces, we are planning to use automated balancing at the front end to allocate services on demand in a cloud environment and allow generic data access in the back end archive solution

Aided generation of search interfaces to astronomical archives

Astrophysical data provider organizations that host web based interfaces to provide access to data resources have to cope with possible changes in data management that imply partial rewrites of web applications. To avoid doing this manually it was decided to develop a dynamically configurable Java EE web application that can set itself up reading needed information from configuration files. Specification of what information the astronomical archive database has to expose is managed using the TAP SCHEMA schema from the IVOA TAP recommendation, that can be edited using a graphical interface. When configuration steps are done the tool will build a war file to allow easy deployment of the application. <P /

A complete automatization of an educational observatory at INAF-OATs

The Astronomical Observatory of Trieste (OATs), part of the Italian Institute for Astrophysics (INAF), hosts a Celestron C14 telescope, equipped with a robotic Paramount ME equatorial mount, used for public outreach. The telescope is installed inside a dome, recently upgraded with a Beckhoff PLC control system, a SIEMENS inverter for the communication with the motor of the dome's roof, and further equipment to allow the complete automatization of the system. A peculiarity of the system is that, when operating, the telescope may exceed the height of the roof: due to this fact the telescope pointing is constrained by the full opening of the roof and, oppositely, the closing of the roof is allowed only when the telescope is in park position. Appropriate sensors are installed to monitor the position of the telescope to properly handle the complete opening or closing of the roof. Several emergency operations are also foreseen, for example in case of bad weather or lost connection with the user. The PLC software has been developed using TwinCAT software. An OPC-UA server is installed in the PLC and allows the communication with a web interface. The web GUI, developed in PHP and Javascript, allows the user to perform the remote operations like switching on all the instrumentations, open the dome's roof, park the telescope and view the status of the system. Furthermore through TheSkyX software it is possible to perform the pointing of the telescope and its set up. A dedicated script, interfaced with TheSkyX, have been implemented to perform a complete automated acquisition. An appropriate data storage system is foreseen. All these elements, that cooperate to create a fully remoted controlled system, are presented in this paper

A distributed infrastructure for publishing VO services: An implementation

This contribution describes both the design and the implementation details of a new solution for publishing VO services, enlightening its maintainable, distributed, modular and scalable architecture. Indeed, the new publisher is multithreaded and multiprocess. Multiple instances of the modules can run on different machines to ensure high performance and high availability, and this will be true both for the interface modules of the services and the back end data access ones. The system uses message passing to let its components communicate through an AMQP message broker that can itself be distributed to provide better scalability and availability

APOGEO: an Automatic Management System for Astronomical Portals

Since several years IA2 (Italian Center for Astronomical Archive) develops and hosts web portals for accessing various astronomical archives. The experience gained over the years (Knapic et al. 2012) allowed to recognize recurrent architectural patterns and common requirements of all these interfaces, leading to develop APOGEO (Automatic POrtal GEneratOr). APOGEO consists in a set of Java EE tools that allow to generate portals in a standardized way, after a portal administrator has performed an aided configuration process. A portal allows users to query the archive and download its files, guaranteeing proper data access policies. APOGEO architecture is VO-compliant