CASE STUDIES
CASE STUDIES
Mission-Critical DDS Deployed in One of the World’ s Most Powerful Telescopes
CHALLENGE
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope( LSST) project is an historical attempt to draw the first 3D map of the universe.
The project is organized by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy( AURA) and funded by the U. S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation with support through a public-private partnership featuring an immense collaboration of countries, companies and universities, including more than 400 scientists and engineers.
The eight-meter-wide giant telescope will sit atop the Chilean mountain of Cerro Pachón, and will work in tandem with the world’ s largest digital camera, weighing in at more than 6,000 pounds and snapping 3.2-gigapixel images every 20 seconds as it surveys the stars and generates 30 terabytes of data night after night for 10 years.
In the case of LSST, over 96-percent uptime over a 10-year period is required to ensure there are no risks to the $ 500 million program investment and no corruption of experiment data during this timeframe.
SOLUTION
The Object Management Group’ s Data-Distribution Service for Real-Time Systems is being used to control, monitor and regulate the data interfaces and ensuring the right data gets to the right place in real-time within the new LSST facility. DDS was chosen to process data on a colossal volume in an attempt to scale the universe generating over 30 terabytes of data 24 / 7.
The data that DDS is set to handle will come from the largest light-gathering source in the world. The LSST will zero in on some of the faintest objects in the sky and populate a database containing 20 billion objects. Beyond the pure science aspect of the project, scientists will also use LSST to track asteroids and determine whether they pose any impact threat to the earth.
The depth and detail of the incoming information will facilitate creation of a 3D map of the cosmos. LSST will also give scientists a better understanding of the solar system beyond Neptune, including distant objects in the Kuiper Belt and beyond.
BENEFITS
For LSST, it is critical that the applications do not handle the data. DDS was used to help simplify overall system design. Without DDS, the developed applications would have to shoulder the tasks of message interpretation & state management, and the team developing the data-sharing functionality of the system would have been three times larger.
A common characteristic of DDS applications is mission-criticality, an attribute inextricably tied to a system’ s intolerance for failure. Since the data-sharing infrastructure impacts all aspects of a system, its reliability, robustness and fault-tolerance become synonymous with operational success. DDS’ real-time monitoring and predictive capabilities will ensure the survey does not suffer disruptions in its cosmic explorations, securing the data, its quality and the entire equally-massive investment.
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