Dr. Marco Costi Profile

Dr. Marco Costi

at E4 Computer Engineering S.p.A.

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Publications (2)

Proceedings Article | 25 July 2024 Poster + Paper

A reliable and automated orchestrator for the computing system of the ASTRI project

I. Abu, F. Gianotti, M. Lodi, G. Malaspina, M. De Benedetto, F. Fiordoliva, M. Costi, G. Mancini, M. Sardo, M. Rosi, A. Bulgarelli, L. Castaldini, A. Tacchini, V. Conforti, A. Costa, V. Fioretti, S. Gallozzi, F. Lucarelli, K. Munari, N. Parmiggiani, V. Pastore, F. Russo, S. Scuderi, G. Tosti, M. Trifoglio

Proceedings Volume 13101, 131013B (2024) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.3018971

KEYWORDS: Printed circuit board testing, Telescopes, Data storage, Atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes, Data acquisition, Computing systems, Reliability, Observatories, Data transmission, Astronomy

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The ASTRI (”Astrofisica con Specchi a Tecnologia Replicante Italiana”) program, led by the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF), is an international collaboration focused on developing and operating an array of nine 4-meter class, dual-mirror Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes (IACTs). These telescopes are designed to detect gamma-ray radiation at energies above 1 TeV. The ASTRI Mini-Array is being constructed at the Teide Observatory in Tenerife, Canary Islands. To support the development, installation, and operation of the ASTRI Mini-Array, a dedicated on-site Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Infrastructure has been designed. This ICT infrastructure hosts the Computing System for the SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) software, which monitors, controls, and acquires data from the ASTRI Mini-Array telescopes and associated auxiliary hardware. The deployment model for SCADA is based on a combination of containers, bare metal servers, and virtual machines, all of which communicate seamlessly. Containerization techniques, paired with advanced orchestration systems such as Kubernetes, enhance the system’s efficiency. In this paper, we detail the virtual and containerized environment system, which employs the concept of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) in conjunction with a container orchestration system. IaC enhances portability, automation, agility, and version control, while the orchestration system automates deployment, scalability, load balancing, resource management, recovery, and container version management. Together, IaC and container orchestration significantly simplify the infrastructure and application management. IaC automates the provisioning of basic infrastructure, while container orchestration ensures that containerized applications run efficiently and reliably. This architecture allows us to manage the entire SCADA system with ease, enabling rapid deployment of the entire system—both the environment and applications—at the Teide Observatory or other test sites.

Proceedings Article | 25 July 2024 Poster + Paper

ASTRI Mini-Array on-site information and communication technology infrastructure

F. Gianotti, I. Abu, M. Lodi, A. Tacchini, G. Malaspina, M. De Benedetto, F. Fiordoliva, M. Costi, G. Mancini, D. Gregori, M. Pinetti, M. Sardo, D. Fuzzati, M. Rosi, D. Obbi, P. Bruno, A. Bulgarelli, L. Castaldini, V. Conforti, A. Costa, V. Fioretti, S. Gallozzi, C. Grivel, F. Incardona, G. Leto, F. Lucarelli, K. Munari, N. Parmiggiani, V. Pastore, F. Russo, S. Scuderi, G. Tosti, M. Trifoglio

Proceedings Volume 13101, 1310136 (2024) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.3018973

KEYWORDS: Printed circuit board testing, Telescopes, Switches, Connectors, Control systems, Internet, Data acquisition, Data centers, Cameras, Atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes

Read Abstract +

The ASTRI ("Astrofisica con Specchi a Tecnologia Replicante Italiana") is a collaborative international effort led by the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) for developing an array of nine 4m-class dual-mirror Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes (IACTs) sensitive to gamma-ray radiation at energies above 1 TeV. The array is placed at the Teide Observatory in Tenerife, in the Canary Islands. In order to support the development, installation, and operations of the ASTRI Mini-Array, an on-site Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Infrastructure has been designed. This paper describes the design of this ICT infrastructure, which includes various subsystems dedicated primarily to host the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) software whose aim is to control and monitor the array of telescopes and to perform data acquisition and data quality control. For each subsystem, the best technology solutions were chosen. A dedicated Virtual System based on ProxMox for telescope control, to ensure the easy control and management combined with high reliability and continuity of service was implemented. To ensure the throughput of tens of MB/s the data acquisition and dispatch operations were realized bare metal from the camera and frontier server, combined with a dedicated BeeGFS-based storage system to ensure the necessary performance and provide a distributed, shared and concurrent filesystem. The high performances of the online data quality control and of the Monitoring System are guaranteed by a Kubernetes Technology approach, which also improves the automation, the scaling and deployment. These subsystems and ASTRI telescopes are interconnected by the high-performance network, so special attention has been focused on the network topology to ensure both reliability and data transfer throughput, both in the local network and for transmission to the remote archive facility in Rome where the data are transferred as soon as they are available. The entire ICT infrastructure was engineered to have no Single Point of Failure (SPOF) and to ensure high availability, because there will be no one dedicated to its maintenance on-site at Teide and during the night. Therefore, all the most critical systems have been designed in hot redundancy, that is, capable of supporting a failure without service interruption.

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