Running a distributed virtual observatory: U.S. Virtual Astronomical Observatory operations

摘要

Operation of the US Virtual Astronomical Observatory shares some issues with modern physical observatories, e.g.,intimidating data volumes and rapid technological change, and must also address unique concerns like the lack of directcontrol of the underlying and scattered data resources, and the distributed nature of the observatory itself. In this paperwe discuss how the VAO has addressed these challenges to provide the astronomical community with a coherent set ofscience-enabling tools and services. The distributed nature of our virtual observatory-with data and personnelspanning geographic, institutional and regime boundaries-is simultaneously a major operational headache and theprimary science motivation for the VAO. Most astronomy today uses data from many resources. Facilitation ofmatching heterogeneous datasets is a fundamental reason for the virtual observatory. Key aspects of our approachinclude continuous monitoring and validation of VAO and VO services and the datasets provided by the community,monitoring of user requests to optimize access, caching for large datasets, and providing distributed storage services thatallow user to collect results near large data repositories. Some elements are now fully implemented, while others areplanned for subsequent years. The distributed nature of the VAO requires careful attention to what can be astraightforward operation at a conventional observatory, e.g., the organization of the web site or the collection andcombined analysis of logs. Many of these strategies use and extend protocols developed by the international virtualobservatory community. Our long-term challenge is working with the underlying data providers to ensure high qualityimplementation of VO data access protocols (new and better 'telescopes'), assisting astronomical developers to buildrobust integrating tools (new 'instruments'), and coordinating with the research community to maximize the scienceenabled.© (2012) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.