ICT ed E-Infrastructures in INAF

Nella storia recente dell’Astrofisica le infrastrutture informatiche sia di calcolo che di archiviazione e fruizione degli archivi sono state di crescente importanza per la produzione di risultati scientifici di eccellenza. Infrastrutture di piccola e media scala, dalla workstation individuale al centro di calcolo di struttura, hanno lasciato posto alla necessità di accesso a medie e grandi infrastrutture centralizzate a cui garantire accesso ai ricercatori. L’adesione dell’INAF a grandi infrastrutture di ricerca di livello mondiale, ad esempio SKA e CTA, e il crescente proliferare di iniziative nazionali, europee e mondiali di creazioni di cluster di calcolo o cloud di archiviazione condivisi, ha ulteriormente innalzato il livello di esigenze, correnti e future, della comunità scientifica rendendo opportuno un cambio di passo a livello di Ente nell’approvvigionamento, gestione, offerta e coordinamento delle risorse di calcolo ed archiviazione per l’Astrofisica. Esiste pertanto un generale consenso nella comunità circa la necessità di riformare ed aggiornare l’offerta di Information technology (ICT) interna ad INAF per adeguarla alle nuove sfide che si prospettano all’orizzonte, legate ad un ruolo sempre più crescente della componente informatica nella produzione, qualificazione, conservazione e fruibilità del dato osservativo e teorico in Astronomia e Astrofisica. La via maestra, in linea con le tendenze internazionali, è la centralizzazione della ubicazione ed erogazione delle risorse in un contesto di competenze distribuite. Infatti una proliferazione non coordinata di centri di calcolo di piccole dimensioni, quanto si otterrebbe distribuendo senza criterio le componenti di nuova acquisizione presso le varie strutture di ricerca, implicherebbe una crescita dei costi indiretti ed una riduzione dell'efficienza del sistema complessivo causata dalla frammentazione. Passi importanti in questa direzione sono già stati intrapresi dall’Ente. Tra questi il più rilevante è senza dubbio l’investimento nel “tecnopolo” di Bologna, occasione per una azione integrata in un contesto dinamico e riconosciuto a livello governativo e nazionale ed in una prospettiva di medio-lungo termine. Altri importanti passi intermedi sono resi possibili da opportunità come quella recentemente concretizzata di rilevare in comodato d’uso parti del cluster denominato “Galileo” in via di dismissione da parte del CINECA. Questo documento presenta una analisi di scenario delle esigenze attuali o previste per il prossimo futuro in termini di infrastrutture informatiche, l’offerta attualmente disponibile a copertura di queste esigenze e la prospettiva di evoluzione dell’offerta a copertura delle esigenze previste. Il documento include inoltre una proposta di futura governance del settore, basata su un soggetto attuatore autonomo, la e-infrastructure di INAF, ed un soggetto preposto al coordinamento, controllo e ruolo abilitante per il settore, la UTG “Astrofisica Computazionale”

Challenges and strategies for the maintenance of the SKA Telescope Manager

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is an ambitious project aimed to build a radio telescope that will enable breakthrough science not possible with current facilities over the next 50 years. Because of this long expected operational period, the maintenance of Telescope Manager (TM), the SKA Element responsible for the coordination of all Elements composing the Telescope (e.g. Dishes for mid-frequency or Low-Frequency Aperture Arrays), plays a crucial role for the overall SKA operation. A challenge is represented by the technological evolution in hardware and software, which is rather fast nowadays: only in the last 10 years, for instance, new operating systems were born, as well as new technologies for data storage and for calculation. Dealing with such changing environment deserves therefore a deep analysis in terms of maintenance. In spite of the importance of hardware maintenance for TM, its software maintenance is actually the real challenge, given TM is a system almost entirely composed by software applications. In computer science, indeed, it is almost impossible to build a software which does not need to be changed over time: new requirements emerge, old requirements change during application lifetime, errors are discovered or performance must be improved. For all these reasons the management of software changes is critical to maintain the value of the software developed, especially for a complex system like SKA TM. In this paper the maintenance for both SKA TM hardware and software is presented with respect to the Operational (i.e. related to Maintenance Process) and Organizational (i.e. related to Logistic Support) aspects

VisIVO: an interoperable visualisation tool for Virtual Observatory data

We present VisIVO a software for the visualisation and analysis of astrophysical data which can be retrieved from the Virtual Observatory framework and for cosmological simulations. VisIVO is VO standards compliant and supports the most important astronomical data formats such as FITS, HDF5 and VOTables. Data can be retrieved directly connecting to an available VO service (i.e., VizieR WS), loaded in the local computer memory where they can be further selected, visualised and manipulated

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

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

The AstroBID: preserving and sharing the Italian astronomical heritage

The cultural heritage of the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF), made of rare and modern Books, Instruments and archival Documents, the AstroBID, marks the milestones in the history of astronomy in Italy. INAF, in collaboration with the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Bologna, has developed a project to preserve, digitize, and valorize its patrimony by creating a web portal Polvere di Stelle. It shows the cultural heritage of 12 libraries and historical archives, and 13 instrument collections, and allows both academics and a wider audience to search simultaneously the AstroBID materials

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 /