Access Grid at the APS (fwd)

[Ivan R. Judson]

Here's an update from the XOR cat.

--Ivan
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Date: Wed, 09 Jun 2004 21:00:26 -0500
From: Brian Tieman <tieman at aps.anl.gov>
To: judson at mcs.anl.gov
Subject: Access Grid at the APS

Ivan,

We had a meeting over here with some of the big wigs.  The network guy 
(Ken Sidorowicz) is ready to give it a try at sector 2.  The EPICS 
people (Ken Evans and Andrew Johnson) would like to peek over the 
shoulders of whoever is setting things up so they can get a better 
understanding.  They think vnc is the way to go, but they're worried 
about performance.

We can have a 1.3GHz computer set up with whatever OS you tell us is 
best for the server.  On that machine we would also install an EPICS PV 
Gateway server.  The PV Gateway is an EPICS tool that can forward EPICS 
network requests through to a different subnet.  The Access Grid server 
would be set up on a network that normally can not talk CA to the 
beamline and so the PV Gateway server would provide us with the 
"sentinal" features we had talked about--namely that only PVs the 
gateway is configured for will be available to the Access Grid.

I know you guys are busy littlle beavers over there, but if you can 
point me to some good cameras/microphones to buy for an office node, we 
can place that order.  Also, if there's anything else we can get started 
on to set things up over here, let me know so we can get that going as well.

My group leader tells me he will need initial budgets by mid-July so 
he's hoping to see enough working by then to make reasonable estimates 
of what might be needed to support this for all of XOR--or if it's worth 
doing at all...

Thanks!

Brian