The Tiny Instrument Element

Abstract of the Tiny Instrument Element

In the past few years, the idea of extending the Grid to cover also the remote access, control, management of instrument devices has been explored in a few initiatives. Existing tools lack in generality and require advanced specialized computer science knowledge, thus making them difficult to be broadly adopted in the scientific community. In this paper we present a new open source initiative that is designed to overcome these problems. The Tiny Instrument Element project defines a high level architecture for plugging instruments into the Grid and provides the corresponding skeleton implementation. This lightweight approach, as opposed to existing middleware-based solutions, reduces the effort required to Gridify existing instruments. The paper evaluates the proposed abstraction with a case study from a pervasive computing scenario.

Some relevant Key words: IoT, Internet of things, smart devices, cloud computing, web service, ubiquitous computing, plugin.

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In this paper we present the Tiny Instrument Element project showing our proposed novel approach to the integration between instruments and the Grid. Instead of building a new middleware we propose to use a semifinite artifact (i.e., a skeleton software) that can be tailored to meet the requirements of a specific instrument characteristics. This approach not only provides an uniform access to the Gridified instruments but also leaves the flexibility to customize and tune the Tiny Instrument Element for optimal monitoring and control of the instruments. From the case study we have seen that none of the code included in the Tiny Instrument Element release was redundant and that the time required in order to gain a good understanding of the API and the corresponding skeleton was quite small. This supports the idea of template-based software development. The Project has started full open source activities in September 2008. If we exclude our personal activity and the one performed by the case study participants, until the end of 2008, the project website attracted 304 unique visitors (7 Returning many times). The source code was downloaded 40 times and the authors were contacted with positive feedback by 2 users of the community. Whereas the project has been running for a relatively short time, these numbers are promising and show the benefit of a transparent development process to achieve wider dissemination of our research ideas

Full article available at the following link:

The Tiny Instrument Element:
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-01671-4_27

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Cite this paper as:

F. Lelli and C. Pautasso The Tiny Instrument Element Project In proc of 4th International Conference on Grid and Pervasive Computing (GPC) , Geneva, Switzerland, May 2009

The Many Faces of the Integration of Instruments and the Grid

The #tiny Instrument Element for integrating #IoT and #Cloud . An early precursor of #EdgeComputing
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