A microservice-based portal for X-ray transient and variable sources

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1 Institute for Applied Mathematics and Information Technologies “E. Magenes”, National Research Council of Italy, Genoa, Italy
2 Istituto di Astrofisica Spaziale e Fisica Cosmica, National Institute for Astrophysics, Milan, Italy
3 Institute for Advanced Study, Pavia, Italy
4 Scuola Universitaria Superiore IUSS Pavia, Pavia, Italy
5 Sezione di Pavia, National Institute for Nuclear Physics, Pavia, Italy
DOI
10.7287/peerj.preprints.2519v2
Published
Accepted
Subject Areas
Distributed and Parallel Computing, Scientific Computing and Simulation
Keywords
Science Gateways, Astrophysics, Microservices
Copyright
© 2017 D'Agostino et al.
Licence
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
Cite this article
D'Agostino D, Roverelli L, Zereik G, De Luca A, Salvaterra R, Belfiore A, Lisini G, Novara G, Tiengo A. 2017. A microservice-based portal for X-ray transient and variable sources. PeerJ Preprints 5:e2519v2

Abstract

Modern soft X-ray observatories can yield unique insights into time domain astrophysics, and a huge amount of information is stored - and largely unexploited - in data archives. Like a treasure-hunt, the EXTraS project is harvesting the hitherto unexplored temporal domain information buried in the serendipitous data collected by the European Photon Imaging Camera (EPIC) instrument onboard the ESA XMM-Newton, in 16 years of observations. Part of this analysis is performed through a dedicated science gateway, the EXTraS portal, whose initial release is the subject of this paper. In particular the focus is on its light software architecture, based on the use of microservices, providing a better resilience and more decoupled development lifecycle with respect to the approaches followed by the most used science gateway toolkits. The full paper is available at http://ceur-ws.org/Vol- 1871/paper8.pdf

Author Comment

The paper has been published in the conference proceedings as Vol-1871 of CEUR-WS.org, URN: urn:nbn:de:0074-1871-4