The Auger Observatory is located in a remote region far from academic or research Institutions. The presence of scientists and technicians from the collaborating Institutions on the site is currently necessary during the phases of installation and commissioning of the detectors. In the long term, however, it will be very difficult to maintain such level of involvement at the site when scientists will be very busy with data analysis at their home Institutions in Europe and US. It would also be exceedingly expensive in terms of travel expenses.
In the model of operation of the Observatory which is being developed for the long term, it is foreseen to have on the site a permanent staff of “operators”, limited in number, with sufficient technical skills to ensure fast replacement of defective components. The diagnosis of detector malfunctioning and maintenance, however, can be done on-line by the local staff only for the more trivial problems. Generally this diagnosis requires the processing and analysis of cosmic ray shower data and of calibration data at a high level of sophistication.
The existence of a high capacity communication infrastructure suggests that development of techniques of remote monitoring and control of data taking is the right answer to the challenging problem of running the Observatory over its expected lifetime of about 15 years.
This is the objective of the Joint Research Activity JRA1.
JRA1 focuses on the following goals.
- A distributed system for remote monitoring of the data taking thus allowing scientists of the various European teams to assist the local operators from their home Institutions as if they were at the site.
- Active intervention in the case of malfunctioning of some detector components. This goal requires establishing a chain with feedback from the access to the data by the European research teams to data processing, analysis and interpretation, followed by adequate reaction back to the Observatory.
- Both goals require also the implementation of leading edge security techniques to avoid that the increased level of transparency and access could create danger to the smooth operation of the Observatory.
The Auger Observatory is a hybrid system combining two different detectors, the Surface Detector (SD) and the Fluorescence Detector (FD). The characteristics and duty-cycle of the two sub-systems naturally impose rather different requirements on the on-line systems (both hardware and software) that supervise the operation of each detector. It is therefore natural that the development of remote monitoring and control will have to proceed along two independent lines of activity that will be merged at the end.
The architecture of the already existing data acquisition system is a good starting point for the present development. The present system of monitoring and remote control of the FD telescopes from the Auger Central Campus has been implemented by a group from the “Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe - Institut of Data Processing and Electronics” (FZK-IPE). The control of the SD detectors from the central data acquisition was built by a group from the “Laboratoire de Physique Nucléaire et des Hautes Energies” of (CNRS/IN2P3).
Both groups, FZK-IPE and CNRS/IN2P3, participate in the present activity.
The existing on-line software will be re-written and extended to use state-of-art Grid services to make the required remote monitoring and control access possible. In our opinion this is a natural extension of the Grid concept to remote and secure management of facilities. The approach that we foresee to establish worldwide availability and flexibility of monitoring services and control functions will be outstanding.
It is clear that interactive communication between the European Institutions and the Auger Observatory requires a reliable high bandwidth connection.
The procedures developed will be first tested in Europe and then implemented at the Observatory once the communication infrastructure has been upgraded.
The last phase of this development will be the final test, carried out by the whole community of users.
The present data acquisition system which is the start point for this work is well understood and tested. Therefore applying the same concepts in the present development will guarantee a smooth transition to the new system.
