Instrument Element: a new grid component that enables the control of remote instrumentation

TLDR

Grid technologies provide vast computational and storage resources and enable collaboration among virtual organizations, yet they lack mechanisms for close interaction with physical instruments. This work proposes and implements the Instrument Element, a grid component that abstracts real instruments and offers users an interactive interface to control them. The Instrument Element is built on a modular software architecture that integrates instrument abstraction, control services, and data handling, and its prototype was evaluated for performance and demonstrated in two concrete use cases. Performance evaluation of the prototype demonstrates acceptable latency and throughput, and its successful integration in two use cases confirms the feasibility of instrument control within grid environments.

Abstract

Current grid technologies offer unlimited computational power and storage capacity for scientific research and business activities in heterogeneous areas over the world. Thanks to the grid, different virtual organizations can operate together in order to achieve common goals. However, concrete use cases demand a more close interaction between various types of instruments accessible from the grid, and the classical grid infrastructure, typically composed of computing and storage elements. We cope with this open problem by proposing and realizing the first release of the Instrument Element, i.e., a new grid component that provides the computational/data grid with an abstraction of real instruments, and grid users with a more interactive interface to control them. In this paper, we discuss in detail the proposed software architecture for this new component, then we report some performance results concerning its first prototype, and finally we present a pair of concrete use cases, which the Instrument Element has been successfully integrated with.