SMA-X: versatile information sharing in and around telescopes, and beyond

Attila Kovács; Paul Grimes; Christopher Moriarty; Robert Wilson

doi:10.1117/12.3021429

25 July 2024 SMA-X: versatile information sharing in and around telescopes, and beyond

Attila Kovács, Paul Grimes, Christopher Moriarty, Robert Wilson

Proceedings Volume 13101, Software and Cyberinfrastructure for Astronomy VIII; 131014H (2024) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.3021429
Event: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2024, Yokohama, Japan

Abstract

We developed the SMA eXchange (SMA-X) as a real-time data sharing solution, built atop a central Redis database. SMA-X provides efficient low-latency and high-throughput real-time sharing of hierarchically structured data among the various systems and subsystems of the telescope. It enables fast, atomic retrievals of specific leaf elements, branches, and sub-trees, including associated metadata (types, dimensions, timestamps, and origins, and more). At the Submillimer Array (SMA) we rely on it since 2021 to share a diverse set of approximately 10,000 real-time variables, including arrays, across more than 100 computers, with information being published every 10 ms in some cases. SMA-X is open-source and will be available to all through a set of public GitHub repositories in Summer 2024, including C/C++ and Python3 libraries, and a set of tools, to allow integration with observatory applications. A set of command-line tools provide access to the database from the POSIX shell and/or from any scripting language, and we also provide a configurable tool for archiving the observatory state at regular intervals into a time-series SQL database to create a detailed historical record.

(2024) Published by SPIE. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.

Citation Download Citation

Attila Kovács, Paul Grimes, Christopher Moriarty, and Robert Wilson "SMA-X: versatile information sharing in and around telescopes, and beyond", Proc. SPIE 13101, Software and Cyberinfrastructure for Astronomy VIII, 131014H (25 July 2024); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.3021429

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KEYWORDS

Telescopes

Databases

Data storage

Control systems

Observatories

Decision making

Distributed computing

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