Summary of the first HTN Workshop

1
Summary of the first HTN Workshop

• Alasdair Allan1,2, Karsten Bischoff 3, Martin
  Burgdorf 4, Brad Cavanagh5, Damien Christian6,
  Neil Clay 4, Rob Dickens 7, Frossie Economou5,
  Mehri Fadavi8, Stephen Fraser4, Thomas Granzer9,
  Sandy Grosvenor10, Frederic V. Hessman11, Tim
  Jenness5, Anuradha Koratkar12, Matthew Lehner13,
  Chris Mottram4, Tim Naylor1, Eric S. Saunders1,
  Nikolaos Solomos14,15, Iain A. Steele 4, Georg
  Tuparev16, W. Thomas Vestrand17, Robert R.
  White17, Sarah Yost18
• 1School of Physics, University of Exeter, Stocker
  Road, Exeter, EX4 4QL, U.K.
• 2Royal Observatory, University of Edinburgh,
  Edinburgh, U.K.
• 3Teleskoptechnik Halfmann, Gessertshausener
  Strasse, 8D-86356 Neusäss-Vogelsang, Germany
• 4Astrophysics Research Institute, Liverpool JMU,
  Twelve Quays House, Egerton Wharf, Birkenhead,
  CH41 1LD, U.K.
• 5Joint Astronomy Centre, 660 N. Aohoku Place,
  University Park, Hilo, Hawaii, 96720, U.S.A.
• 6Department of Physics Astronomy, Queen's
  University Belfast, County Antrim, BT7 1NN, U.K.
• 7Latterfrosken Software Development Ltd., 32
  Bradford Street, Walsall, West Midlands, WS1 3QA,
  U.K.
• 8Jackson State University, P.O. Box 17660,
  Jackson, Mississippi 39217, U.S.A.
• 9AIP, An der Sternwarte 16, D-14482 Potsdam,
  Germany
• 10NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
  2077, U.S.A.
• 11Inst. f. Astrophysik, Georg-August-Universität,
  Friedrich-Hund-Platz 1, 37077 Göttingen, Germany
• 12University of Maryland, Baltimore County, 5523
  Research Park Drive, Suite 320, Baltimore, MD
  21228, U.S.A.
• 13Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 60
  Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.
• 14Physics Sector, Hellenic Naval Academy, Piraeus
  18503, Greece
• 15National Astronomy Centre, Ainos Mountain,
  Kefallinia Island, Greece
• 16Tuparev Technologies Inc., Sofijski Geroj 3,
  Vh.2, 4th Floor, Apt. 27, 1612 Sofia, Bulgaria
• 17Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM
  875444, U.S.A.
• 18University of Michigan, Randall Laboratory, 450
  Church Street, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-1040,
  U.S.A.

2
The HTN Workshop
A

• The eSTAR project
• RoboNet-1.0
• Joint Astronomy Centre
• RAPTOR/TALONS
• ROTSE
• TAOS
• MONET
• STELLA
• Science Goal Monitor (SGM)
• Super-WASP project
• EUDOXOS network
• Pilot Small Telescope Network

Delegates at the HTN Workshop in Exeter, U.K.,
July 2005
Initial funding for the HTN was from an EPSRC
grant for Links to International e-Science
Sister Projects
3
What is the HTN consortium?
A

• Aims
• Establish the standards for interoperability
  between robotic telescope networks.
• Work towards the establishment of an e-market for
  the exchange of telescope time.
• Establish the standards for interoperability with
  the Virtual Observatory (VO) for event
  notification.

http//www.telescope-networks.org/
4
Why was the HTN inevitable?
A

• Better question is Why was the Internet
  inevitable?
• Just as we saw the Internet grow organically out
  of existing proprietary networks, so we might
  expect the emerging proprietary networks of
  telescopes to join together into more cohesive
  whole.
• Those scattered proto-networks already exist

5
What science can it do?
R

• There exists a large number of potential projects
  in the time domain that become much easier with
  access to global facilities and all-sky coverage.
• rapid Gamma-Ray Burst follow-up
• microlensing planet searches
• pre-main sequence star variability
• long term variable star monitoring
• supernova cosmology
• asteroid and NEO discovery and recovery
• ground based support for satellite observations

6
What did we discuss?
R

• Project perspectives
• Document standard
• Protocol standard
• Transport standard
• Event notification
• Establishing an e-Market

7
What did we decide?
R

• Document standard
• leverage the existing work on RTML
• Protocol standard
• leverage the existing work by eSTAR
• Event notification
• interoperability with the VO
• use their VOEvent standard
• participate in standards process

8
Document standard
A

• Adopted ltRTMLgt 3. as the core document standard
• Provisionally adopted ltVOEventgt for event
  notification
• Developments since the 1st workshop
• IVOA VOEvent group created a ltTransportgt document
  for network house keeping tasks
• should we adopt this?

9
Protocol standard
A

• Document exchange protocol agreed
• how, when and why to exchange documents
• not how they are transported

10
Event notification
R

• We needed
• concise description of observation
• fast transport and parsing
• both human and computer readable
• At the time of the last workshop VOEvent didnt
  meet our needs, things have changed

11
What didnt we decide?
R

• Transport standard
• this might be a good thing?
• although we didnt decide on a default transport
  mechanism the VO has for VOEvent, should we?
• e-Market
• barely got started on the discussion
• presence taken into account architecturally?
• Sociology
• allocation of telescope time
• sharing of data products

12
Does transport matter?
A

• Why? Nobody thought about RFC 1149 when IP
  datagram packets were standardised
• See http//www.blug.linux.no/rfc1149/

13
Transport standards
A

• Became clear during the meeting that the protocol
  for exchanging messages must be entirely neutral
  with respect to the underlying transport
  protocols.
• Future-proof us against technological advancement
• Also allows technologically simple
  implementations to be deployed today.

14
Transport standards
A

• The VOEvent group came to the same conclusion
• But they did specify two default transport
  protocols for the backbone network.
• vanilla TCP
• RSS
• Should we do the same?

15
e-Market in telescope time
A

• Perhaps one of the few scalable ways of providing
  access to the growing number of robotic and
  remote telescopes.
• Architecturally perhaps the easiest way of
  allowing autonomous real-time access to these
  telescopes
• Otherwise we have to make numerous bi-lateral
  agreements between existing and future networks

16
Different types of e-market
A

• Centralised
• Semi-centralised
• Distributed
• Stone-age

17
Sociological problems
R

• Time on large telescopes fiercely guarded
• To bootstrap the network perhaps we should apply
  into the existing TACs for time, e.g. UKIRT
• Need general science goal?

18
Summary
R

• Paradigm we developed cuts across notions of
  master schedulers running a network of
  telescopes.
• Need to agree protocols now, whilst the networks
  and their associated paradigms are in their
  infancy.
• These discussions are going on elsewhere, we are
  not alone

http//www.telescope-networks.org/
19
Transient Science and Telescope Network Conference
Science
Instrumentation
Networks
Notification
2nd Transient Event Science workshop 3rd VOEvent
development workshop 3rd Heterogeneous Telescope
Network workshop
June 2007 (7 days) within last 2 weeks (actual
date tentative) Santa Fe, New Mexico USA