A distributed plasma physics experiment system using CORBA

In the framework of the EU-funded Dynacore project an experiment system using a scalable and object-oriented architecture will be built. The system will be component-based and can be extended with little effort by the end-users. It will allow experiments to be monitored and controlled in real time over wide area (Internet) links. The data produced by the experiments will be accessible from any given location that has Internet connectivity available. CORBA will be used as the basic plumbing for component interaction. This allows all components in the system to interact in a well-defined way through interfaces defined in IDL, while allowing each component to be implemented using the ORB and platform most suited for the job. Since not all implementations of CORBA provide the possibility of secure connections, options for encryption of the data streams between clients and servers outside of software control are needed. Some schemes for hardware encryption inside routers and/or switches are under investigation. For the actual data storage, objectivity will be used because its object-oriented nature fits well in the whole framework and because it is capable of handling the amounts of data that will typically be produced in a plasma physics experiment (a Terabyte per year).