What is the ACS Workshop?

The ALMA Common Software (ACS) Workshop at UTFSM is a five-day event, organized by ALMA-UTFSM Group, to be held from November 9 to 13, 2009 at Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María (Valparaíso, Chile). It will consist of two days of presentations given by some of the invited participants, followed by a three-day basic and advanced track about ACS specific topics. The basic track will consist in a guided hands-on work, developing distributed ACS components.The advanced track will include technical presentations and/or discussions about specific ACS topics.

With this Workshop we wish to gather together ACS developers and ACS current and potential users, with the goal of having an introduction to the ACS framework, discussing about its current development status, and exploring ideas about how ACS could be used by other projects outside ALMA.

The Workshop's organization is based on previous ones that have been taking place at ESO Headquarter in Garching, Germany between 2004 and 2007, and at UTFSM since 2007 (see links on the side bar). The ALMA-UTFSM Group is financed by the ALMA-Conicyt Fund.

What is the ALMA-UTFSM Group?

The ALMA-UTFSM Group was created as a distributed systems research team on astronomical and non-astronomical applications in the year 2004. The choice of the ALMA Common Software framework (ACS) as the development platform came from the experience gained during summer jobs at ESO observatories. After three years of informal contributions to ACS development, the team presented a technology exchange initiative to the ALMA-CONICYT Fund 2006, which was granted in 2007. Through the past years, the UTFSM helped the ACS team with nice-to-have applications and testing.

Today, ALMA-UTFSM is part of the Computer Systems Research Group and is involved in several contributions to ACS, and the development of a flexible telescope control system (gTCS) framework which aims to encapsulate common requirements and will provide a uniform software interface to different telescope types. In preparation for this challenging objective, several small projects are currently being developed to build up the necessary experience.

Also we have multiple collaborations directly with ACS and with the ALMA people, matter of fact, a set of GUI's have been created to be used in the ALMA OSF by the operators, like the Sampling System Gui, and lastly the Alarm Configuration Gui, two very importants pieces of software that has been developed with the constant feedback of the OSF to get all their requirements.

Apart from GUI's, we have been working in the repackaging of ACS to another systems, this include trying to compile ACS with un-oficcialy supported OS or with different versions of gcc. The efforts are now in being able to run C++ code inside an embedded system (which requieres cross-compiling) and also, we sucessfuly port ACS to the windows platform, in specific the Java side.

The other interesting edge of the team work is the technology transfer initiatives. Several inter-university collaborations are flourishing after the first ACS Workshop held at the UTFSM in 2007 and also in the 2008. Today, six former team members are working as part of the ALMA Computing group. Seven other students worked during their last summer jobs in ALMA related development. For the future we are expecting to keep collaborating with another universities of Chile and also keep the group open to new topics of research. Currently, about 15 people are involved in the group's activities.