ICALEPCS2013 - List of Authors (Van den Heever, L.)

Paper

Title

Page

MeerKAT Control and Monitoring - Design Concepts and Status

19

L. Van den Heever
SKA South Africa, National Research Foundation of South Africa, Cape Town, South Africa

Funding: National Research Foundation of South Africa
This presentation gives a status update of the MeerKAT Control & Monitoring subsystem focusing on the development philosophy, design concepts, technologies and key design decisions. The presentation will be supplemented by a poster (if accepted) with **live demonstation** of the current KAT-7 Control&Monitoring system. The vision for MeerKAT includes to a) use Offset Gregorian antennas in a radio telescope array combined with optimized receiver technology in order to achieve superior imaging and maximum sensitivity, b) be the most sensitive instrument in the world in L-band, c) be an instrument that will be considered the benchmark for performance and reliability by the scientific community at large, and d) be a true precursor for the SKA that will be integrated into the SKA-mid dish array. The 7-dish engineering prototype (KAT-7) for MeerKAT is already producing exciting science and is being operated 24x7. The first MeerKAT antenna will be on site by the end of this year and the first two Receptors will be fully integrated and ready for testing by April 2014. By December 2016 hardware for all 64 receptors will be installed and accepted and 32 antennas will be fully commissioned.

Slides MOCOAAB06 [1.680 MB]

MOPPC100

SKA Monitioring and Control Progress Status

340

S. Roy Chaudhuri, S. Natarajan
TRDDC, Pune, India
D. Barbosa
GRIT, Aveiro, Portugal
A. Bridger
ROE, UTAC, United Kingdom
T. Coiffard
GTD, Barcelona, Spain
Y. Gupta, Y.G. Wadadekar
NCRA, Pune, India
J.C. Guzman
CSIRO ATNF, Epping, Australia
V.K. Mohile
PSL, Pune, India
R. Smareglia
INAF-OAT, Trieste, Italy
L. Van den Heever
SKA South Africa, National Research Foundation of South Africa, Cape Town, South Africa
S. Vrcic
DRAO, Penticton, British Columbia, Canada

The Monitoring and Control system for the SKA radio telescope is now moving from the conceptual design to the system requirements and design phase, with the formation of a consortium geared towards delivering the Telescope Manager (TM) work package. Recent program decisions regarding hosting of the telescope across two sites, Australia and South Africa, have brought in new challenges from the TM design perspective. These include strategy to leverage the individual capabilities of autonomous telescopes, and also integrating the existing precursor telescopes (ASKAP and MeerKat) with heterogenous technologies and approaches into the SKA. A key design goal from the viewpoint of minimizing development and lifecycle costs is to have a uniform architectural approach across the telescopes, and to maximize standardization of software and instrumentation across the systems, despite potential variations in system hardware and procurement arrangements among the participating countries. This paper discusses some of these challenges, and their mitigation approaches that the consortium intends to work upon, along with an update on the current status and progress on the overall TM work.

THCOBA06

Virtualization and Deployment Management for the KAT-7 / MeerKAT Control and Monitoring System

1422

N. Marais, P.S. Swart, L. Van den Heever, C.C.A. de Villiers
SKA South Africa, National Research Foundation of South Africa, Cape Town, South Africa

Funding: National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africa
To facilitate efficient deployment and management of the Control and Monitoring software of the South African 7-dish Karoo Array Telescope (KAT-7) and the forthcoming Square Kilometer Array (SKA) precursor, the 64-dish MeerKAT Telescope, server virtualization and automated deployment using a host configuration database is used. The advantages of virtualization is well known; adding automated deployment from a configuration database, additional advantages accrue: Server configuration becomes deterministic, development and deployment environments match more closely, system configuration can easily be version controlled and systems can easily be rebuilt when hardware fails. We chose the Debian GNU/Linux based Proxmox VE hypervisor using the OpenVZ single kernel container virtualization method along with Fabric (a Python ssh automation library) based deployment automation and a custom configuration database. This paper presents the rationale behind these choices, our current implementation and our experience with it, and a performance evalution of OpenVZ and KVM. Tests include a comparison of application specific networking performance over 10GbE using several network configurations.

Slides THCOBA06 [5.044 MB]

Paper	Title	Page
MOCOAAB06	MeerKAT Control and Monitoring - Design Concepts and Status	19
	L. Van den Heever SKA South Africa, National Research Foundation of South Africa, Cape Town, South Africa
	Funding: National Research Foundation of South Africa This presentation gives a status update of the MeerKAT Control & Monitoring subsystem focusing on the development philosophy, design concepts, technologies and key design decisions. The presentation will be supplemented by a poster (if accepted) with live demonstation of the current KAT-7 Control&Monitoring system. The vision for MeerKAT includes to a) use Offset Gregorian antennas in a radio telescope array combined with optimized receiver technology in order to achieve superior imaging and maximum sensitivity, b) be the most sensitive instrument in the world in L-band, c) be an instrument that will be considered the benchmark for performance and reliability by the scientific community at large, and d) be a true precursor for the SKA that will be integrated into the SKA-mid dish array. The 7-dish engineering prototype (KAT-7) for MeerKAT is already producing exciting science and is being operated 24x7. The first MeerKAT antenna will be on site by the end of this year and the first two Receptors will be fully integrated and ready for testing by April 2014. By December 2016 hardware for all 64 receptors will be installed and accepted and 32 antennas will be fully commissioned.
	Slides MOCOAAB06 [1.680 MB]

MOPPC100	SKA Monitioring and Control Progress Status	340
	S. Roy Chaudhuri, S. Natarajan TRDDC, Pune, India D. Barbosa GRIT, Aveiro, Portugal A. Bridger ROE, UTAC, United Kingdom T. Coiffard GTD, Barcelona, Spain Y. Gupta, Y.G. Wadadekar NCRA, Pune, India J.C. Guzman CSIRO ATNF, Epping, Australia V.K. Mohile PSL, Pune, India R. Smareglia INAF-OAT, Trieste, Italy L. Van den Heever SKA South Africa, National Research Foundation of South Africa, Cape Town, South Africa S. Vrcic DRAO, Penticton, British Columbia, Canada
	The Monitoring and Control system for the SKA radio telescope is now moving from the conceptual design to the system requirements and design phase, with the formation of a consortium geared towards delivering the Telescope Manager (TM) work package. Recent program decisions regarding hosting of the telescope across two sites, Australia and South Africa, have brought in new challenges from the TM design perspective. These include strategy to leverage the individual capabilities of autonomous telescopes, and also integrating the existing precursor telescopes (ASKAP and MeerKat) with heterogenous technologies and approaches into the SKA. A key design goal from the viewpoint of minimizing development and lifecycle costs is to have a uniform architectural approach across the telescopes, and to maximize standardization of software and instrumentation across the systems, despite potential variations in system hardware and procurement arrangements among the participating countries. This paper discusses some of these challenges, and their mitigation approaches that the consortium intends to work upon, along with an update on the current status and progress on the overall TM work.

THCOBA06	Virtualization and Deployment Management for the KAT-7 / MeerKAT Control and Monitoring System	1422
	N. Marais, P.S. Swart, L. Van den Heever, C.C.A. de Villiers SKA South Africa, National Research Foundation of South Africa, Cape Town, South Africa
	Funding: National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africa To facilitate efficient deployment and management of the Control and Monitoring software of the South African 7-dish Karoo Array Telescope (KAT-7) and the forthcoming Square Kilometer Array (SKA) precursor, the 64-dish MeerKAT Telescope, server virtualization and automated deployment using a host configuration database is used. The advantages of virtualization is well known; adding automated deployment from a configuration database, additional advantages accrue: Server configuration becomes deterministic, development and deployment environments match more closely, system configuration can easily be version controlled and systems can easily be rebuilt when hardware fails. We chose the Debian GNU/Linux based Proxmox VE hypervisor using the OpenVZ single kernel container virtualization method along with Fabric (a Python ssh automation library) based deployment automation and a custom configuration database. This paper presents the rationale behind these choices, our current implementation and our experience with it, and a performance evalution of OpenVZ and KVM. Tests include a comparison of application specific networking performance over 10GbE using several network configurations.
	Slides THCOBA06 [5.044 MB]