Monitoring and controlling the SKA telescope manager: a peculiar LMC system in the framework of the SKA LMCs

The SKA Telescope Manager (TM) is the core package of the SKA Telescope: it is aimed at scheduling observations, controlling their execution, monitoring the telescope health status, diagnosing and fixing its faults and so on. To do that, TM directly interfaces with the Local Monitoring and Control systems (LMCs) of the various SKA Elements (e.g. Dishes, Low-Frequency Aperture Array, etc.), exchanging commands and data with each of them. TM in turn needs to be monitored and controlled, in order its continuous and proper operation - and therefore that of the whole SKA Telescope - is ensured. It appears indeed that, while the unavailability of one or more instances of any other SKA element should result only in a degraded operation for the whole telescope, a problem in TM could cause a complete stop of any operation. In addition to this higher responsibility, a local monitoring and control system for TM has to collect and display logging data directly to operators, perform lifecycle management of TM applications and directly deal - when possible - with management of TM faults (which also includes a direct handling of TM status and performance data). In this paper, the peculiarities presented by the TM monitoring and control and the consequences they have on the design of a related LMC system are addressed and discussed

HDB@ELK: another noSql customization for the HDB++ archiving system

The TANGO controls framework community has put a lot of effort in creating the HDB++ software system that is an high performance, event-driven archiving system. Its design allows storing data into traditional database management systems such as MySQL as well as NoSQL database such as Apache Cassandra. The architecture allow also to easily extend it to other noSql database like, for instance, ELK. This paper describes the step needed to extend the HDB++ and explore the possibilities to use the ELK technology in term of analysis being enabled and tools provided

TM Services: an architecture for monitoring and controlling the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Telescope Manager (TM)

The SKA project is an international effort (10 member and 10 associated countries with the involvement of 100 companies and research institutions) to build the world's largest radio telescope. The SKA Telescope Manager (TM) is the core package of the SKA Telescope aimed at scheduling observations, controlling their execution, monitoring the telescope and so on. To do that, TM directly interfaces with the Local Monitoring and Control systems (LMCs) of the other SKA Elements (for example, Dishes, Correlator and so on), exchanging commands and data with them by using the TANGO controls framework (see [1]). TM in turn needs to be monitored and controlled, in order its continuous and proper operation is ensured and this higher responsibility has been assigned to the TM SER package

TM services: an architecture for monitoring and controlling the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) telescope manager (TM)

The SKA project is an international effort (10 member and 10 associated countries with the involvement of 100 companies and research institutions) to build the world’s largest radio telescope. The SKA Telescope Manager (TM) is the core package of the SKA Telescope aimed at scheduling observations, controlling their execution, mon- itoring the telescope and so on. To do that, TM directly interfaces with the Local Monitoring and Control systems (LMCs) of the other SKA Elements (e.g. Dishes), ex- changing commands and data with them by using the TANGO controls framework. TM in turn needs to be monitored and controlled, in or- der its continuous and proper operation is ensured. This higher responsibility together with others like collecting and displaying logging data to operators, performing lifecycle management of TM applications, directly deal - when possible - with management of TM faults (which also includes a direct handling of TM status and performance data) and interfacing with the virtualization plat- form compose the TM Services (SER) package that is discussed and presented in the present paper

SKA telescope manager: a status update

The international Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project to build two radio interferometers is approaching the end of its design phase, and gearing up for the beginning of formal construction. A key part of this distributed Observatory is the overall software control system: the Telescope Manager (TM). The two telescopes, a Low frequency dipole array to be located in Western Australia (SKA-Low) and a Mid-frequency dish array to be located in South Africa (SKA-Mid) will be operated as a single Observatory, with its global headquarters (GHQ) based in the United Kingdom at Jodrell Bank. When complete it will be the most powerful radio observatory in the world. The TM software must combine the observatory operations based at the GHQ with the monitor and control operations of each telescope, covering the range of domains from proposal submission to the coordination and monitoring of the subsystems that make up each telescope. It must also monitor itself and provide a reliable operating platform. This paper will provide an update on the design status of TM, covering the make-up of the consortium delivering the design, a brief description of the key challenges and the top level architecture, and its software development plans for tackling the construction phase of the project. It will also briefly describe the consortium’s response to the SKA Project’s decision in the second half of 2016 to adopt the processes set out by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) for system architecture design and documentation, including a re-evaluation of its deliverables, documentation and approach to internal reviews.publishe

Satisfying wishes for SKA engineers : How Taranta suite meets users' needs

SKA Construction phase we are now in a transition phase that hopefully will prepare us for the next challenge: start building the SKA. One of the targets of this period is to evaluate the suitability of the Taranta (proper Webjive) Suite for creating engineering User Interfaces (UIs). The Taranta suite is a framework that allows the fast creation of web UIs that directly communicate with TANGO devices. What we need to address are the answers to questions such as: What kind of interface are you targeting? What are the performance constraints that you foresee? What are the current limitations of the tool that would make you choose a different one instead? What will the context of use be? What kind of features would you like the tool to have

How Taranta provides tools to build user interfaces for TANGO devices in the SKA integration environment without writing a line of code

Square Kilometer Array (SKA) is a project aimed to build the largest radio telescope in the world and it has just gotten into the construction phase. In this phase, the ability to develop and integrate software in an integration environment is crucial as it is the ability to visualize system-related information via a User Interface to rapidly verify the correctness of the system behavior and spot any anomaly. This is achieved by SKA teams thanks to the deployment of the Taranta suite in the integration environment. Taranta suite is a web-based toolset jointly developed by MAX IV Laboratory and the SKA that allows the fast development of graphical user interfaces connected to TANGO devices, based on a set of predefined widgets and a drag-and-drop mechanism and therefore without the need to write any additional code. In this paper, we present the Taranta general architecture and the main widgets currently available, we describe how the Taranta suite is deployed in the SKA integration environment and we explain the process used to collect feedback from the SKA community to define the roadmap for the future development of the tool