GT 4.0 Tech Preview: Globus Teleoperations Control Protocol (GTCP)

Overview

This component is a technical preview (commonly referred to as tech preview) for the GT 4.0 final distribution. As such, this documentation is not part of the GT 4.0 official documentation but is provided by the developer(s) to assist early adopters. This component also has very limited support.

Globus Teleoperations Control Protocol (GTCP) is a service interface for telecontrol. It is the WSRF version of the NEESgrid Teleoperations Control Protocol (NTCP), which is used to control heterogeneous physical and computational simulations coupled in geographically-distributed earthquake engineering experiments. It has also been used to control data acquisition systems (triggering the collection of data) and high-resolution cameras (triggering image acquisition) during earthquake engineering experiments, and, to a lesser extent, to control the positioning, focal length, etc. of electron microscopes in a neuroscience application.

GTCP exposes two interfaces: a WSRF-compliant service interface used by clients to control remote instruments and simulations, and a "plugin" interface to facilitate integrating new back ends (physical or computational simulation platforms) to the GTCP server. The plugin interface is a Java interface definition that includes methods for each platform-specific action; a new platform is integrated by writing a class that implements this interface definition