The Architecture Design Of Astronomical Observation And System Monitoring And Control Software For Large Radio Telescope

Astronomical observation and system monitoring and control software is an important component for the wide-band, multi-scientific, and general-purpose QiTai Radio Telescope. Its function is to coordinate the assignments, control and monitor the equipment either remotely or locally, and to perform real-time calibration and adjustment for high precision observations. As the number of the controlling and monitoring nodes increases, the complexity of the observation system also increases and the traditional centralized controlled system can no longer meet the system requirements. This paper proposes an architecture design of astronomical observations which based on message queue middleware ZeroMQ and serialized communication. The architecture consists of a graphical user interaction system, dynamic scheduling, coordination center, health monitoring system, data processing system, local control system and hardware system. As the core of the software system, the function of the coordination center has been emphasized on how to schedule the sequence of observation tasks in most previous studies rather than on scheduling among different systems. In our design, the coordination center controls and manages other systems through task management, multi-threading and message caching making the astronomical observation system functions as an integrated whole. The architecture design adopts a distributed design pattern in combination with the ideas of hierarchy, design patterns and microservices design to equip the system with better cross-platform and highly automated performance requirements.