What is the ACS Workshop?

The ALMA Common Software (ACS) Workshop is a five-day event, organized by the ALMA-UTFSM Group, to be held from November 24th to 28th, 2008 at Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María (Valparaíso, Chile). It will consist of one day of presentations given by some of the invited participants, followed by a four-days basic and advanced track about various ACS topics. The basic track will consist in a guided hands-on work, developing distributed ACS components. The advanced track will include technical presentations and discussions about the Generic Telescope Control System (gTCS) project and 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 since 2004 (see links on the side bar) and at UTFSM in 2007. 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.

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. Today, three former team members are working as part of the ALMA Computing group. Two other students worked during their last summer jobs in ALMA related development. Currently, about 20 people are involved in the group's activities.