SKA Monitor and Control: Harmonization Challenges

Abstract

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project is an international effort to build the world's largest radio telescope, with eventually over a square kilometre of collecting area. The Project is one of the largest scientific endeavours in history and will bring together close to 100 organizations from 20 countries. This is why a recent decision has introduced (SKA-wide) a coherent approach to the monitoring and control task. A dedicated workshop, held in Trieste, has indicated Tango Control Framework as the tool of choice.

This project is too large to be managed in pseudo-real time, due to the ensemble of interacting hardware and software which makes it extremely complex. Once we have identified the right tools to solve it, the current challenge is to find the smartest strategies to implement the whole SKA project by using the Tango Control framework. In particular we are developing a uniform class schema proposal and some alternative approaches to program and control the complex subsystems which constitute a large part of SKA.