A web-based dashboard for the high-level monitoring of ALMA

Abstract

The ALMA radio-telescope's operations depend on the availability of high-level, easy-to-understand status information about all of its components. The ALMA Dashboard aims at providing an all-in-one-place near-real-time overview of the observatory's key elements and figures to both line and senior management. The Dashboard covers a wide range of elements beyond antennas, such as pads, correlator and central local oscillator. Data can be displayed in multiple ways, including: a table view, a compact view fitting on a single screen, a timeline showing detailed information over time, a logbook, a geographical map.

Web Performance Evaluation of High Volume Streaming Data Visualization

“…In radio astronomy projects, such as the SKA, data visualization is commonly used to monitor instruments and visualize the data captured by the telescope. In the case of the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) radio telescope [15], [22] data is saved in a database. The database facilitates ondemand retrieval as well as near real-time polling of the data for visualizations.…”

“…To allow operators to monitor the health, and current status of the different parts of the telescope the SKA requires a real-time quality assessment visualization system. Visual monitoring systems are a feature of all large current radio telescopes, such as the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) [15], and the MeerKAT [16] radio telescope. More generally realtime monitoring visualizations are used by large and data intensive scientific experiments [17], such as CERN [1], [18] and LIGO [19].…”