0MQ: The Intelligent Transport Layer

[Rob Seaman]

Hi John,

> I'd certainly be surprised if scalability were an issue: 2e6 events at – say – 10 kB event is only 20 GB, or about 0.5 MB/s over 12 hours. That sort of rate does't sound worrying at all.

End-to-end latency is also a key issue.  We should bear this in mind when any benchmarks or data challenges are performed.

> I suspect that a lack of documented/visible/extant infrastructure is a much bigger issue. I don't really care what protocol I use to collect events, but when I'm left scrabbling around looking at semi-abandoned web pages and vague, non-specific mentions of backbones and XMPP and pubsub and suchlike, without a definitive, up-to-date summary of the options for actually subscribing to a stream of events, it doesn't really inspire confidence. (The exception being the DC3 Dakota stuff, which is great – much credit to Bob for this!)

Good suggestions for the 2nd edition of Hotwired.  And by all means update the wiki and we can point voevent.org to an introductory page - sounds like a good job for the new chair.

The larger challenge remains the evolutionary path for the bricks-and-morter network of VOEvent brokers.  SkyAlert and GCN provide the main vertabrae on the backbone currently.  What comes next and how do we manage the transition?

Rob