No abstract

The recent developments in virtualization change completely the panorama of the Hardware/OS deployment. New bottlenecks arise in the deployment of application stacks, where IT industry will spend most of the time to assure automation. VIRTU tool aims at managing, configuring and testing distributed ground applications of space systems on a virtualized environment, based on open tools and cross virtualization support. This tool is a spin-off of previous activities performed by the European Space Operations Center (ESOC) and thus it covers the original needs from the ground data systems infrastructure division of the European Space Agency. VIRTU is a testing oriented solution. Its ability to group several virtual machines in an assembly provides the means to easily deploy a full testing infrastructure, including the client/server relationships The possibility of making on-demand request of the testing infrastructure will provide some infrastructure optimizations, specially having in mind that ESA maintains Ground Control software of various missions, and each mission cam potentially have a different set of System baselines and last up to 15 years. The matrix array of supported system combinations is therefore enormous and any improvement on the process provides substantial benefits to ESA, by reducing the effort and schedule of each maintenance activity.The ESOC's case study focuses on the development and validation activities of infrastructure or mission Ground Systems solutions. The Ground Systems solutions are typically composed of distributed systems that could take advantage of virtualized environments for testing purposes. Virtualization is used as way to optimize maintenance for tasks such as testing new releases and patches, test different system's configurations and replicate tests. The main benefits identified are related to deployment test environment and the possibility to have on-demand infrastructure.

Coastline Watch aims to assess the best practices to continuously monitor changes caused by natural processes (such as waves, tides and currents) and strengthen by human intervention or global climate changes. The current solution processes coastal information from Satellite open data for monitoring and makes insitu measurements using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) for impact analysis. It uses a collaborative infrastructure to make processing requests, analyze and share the resulting outcomes with a project team. The first experimental processing service implements a shoreline monitoring chain to detect changes, to establish trends and indicators and to identify potential risks and critical areas. The service uses Landsat program data and it is prepared to support other open or commercial satellites, such as the Sentinel program. After identifying critical areas, the solution uses a methodology to determine impact of changes by making aerial data acquisitions and then estimating surface volumes changes. A cloud infrastructure, based on Amazon AWS technology, provides a distributed environment solution composed by a web portal, processing resources and an OGC database. The portal allows the users to generate new coastal products based on automated scripts, to share the results with the team and to view/download the final products. The service is being demonstrated on the coastal areas of Figueira da Foz and Óbidos lagoon over specific timeframes, being iteratively fine-tuned with users/researchers feedback. The current infrastructure is still under consolidation, with the final goal to provide automated processing tools and a methodology that could be collaboratively and continuously updated by researchers and professionals to generate data from new areas and update existing ones.