Enhanced Remote Astronomical Archive System Based on the File-Level Unlimited Sliding-Window Technique

TL;DR

This paper introduces an enhanced remote data archiving system for astronomy that uses a novel file-level flow-control technique, significantly improving transfer speed and data integrity for large-scale radio telescope data.

Contribution

The paper presents the Unlimited Sliding-Window (USW) flow-control method and its implementation in the ENGAS system, boosting remote data transfer performance for astronomical observations.

Findings

ENGAS is 3-12 times faster than NGAS.

ENGAS fully utilizes network bandwidth.

The system ensures data transfer integrity.

Abstract

Data archiving is one of the most critical issues for modern astronomical observations. With the development of a new generation of radio telescopes, the transfer and archiving of massive remote data have become urgent problems to be solved. Herein, we present a practical and robust file-level flow-control approach, called the Unlimited Sliding-Window (USW), by referring to the classic flow-control method in TCP protocol. Basing on the USW and the Next Generation Archive System (NGAS) developed for the Murchison Widefield Array telescope, we further implemented an enhanced archive system (ENGAS) using ZeroMQ middleware. The ENGAS substantially improves the transfer performance and ensures the integrity of transferred files. In the tests, the ENGAS is approximately three to twelve times faster than the NGAS and can fully utilize the bandwidth of network links. Thus, for archiving radio observation data, the ENGAS reduces the communication time, improves the bandwidth utilization, and solves the remote synchronous archiving of data from observatories such as Mingantu spectral radioheliograph. It also provides a better reference for the future construction of the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) Science Regional Center.