Design goals

The Phymatopus project aims to develop a set of experimental prototypes for a micro-service based architecture to implement an event processing, annotating and filtering system for LSST and ZTF transient events.

The system architecture should be based on a network of micro-services designed to be deployed on an industry standard Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud compute platform.

The system architecture should be able to dynamically change the shape and size (type and number) of services in the the event processing chain in response to changes in the system load.

The system architecture should enable users to dynamically add and remove components in the event processing chain to control the way that events are filtered.

All of the components in the system should provide a standard webservice interface that implements a common control API for all of the different components.

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The design of the system builds on our experience of developing the Firethorn service for query handling, in combination with the OGSA-DAI service for executing database queries and processing the results.

The design of the system builds on our experience of using Docker containers and KVM virtual machines for developing and deploying the Firethorn and OGSA-DAI webservices in a DevOps environment.

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