Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) is going to be world's largest optical telescope once operational. It consists of multiple hardware components each supporting a custom communication protocol at firmware level. Telescope observation requires coordination across these components for tasks such as mirror rotation, instrument and filter selection etc. This talk will discuss how Akka-Typed based actor-messaging layer on top of these custom protocols enabled the task of building higher-level operational software with relative ease.
We will show that Akka-Typed allowed creating type-safe protocol layer and how Akka actors helped with state management in presence async concurrent communication. In addition, we will discuss how support for lifecycle events, fault tolerance, and supervision in actor model turned out to be a great fit for the task. This work is done as an open source project on GitHub
Slides and more information: https://www.reactivesummit.org/2018/schedule/actor-based-architecture-for-worlds-largest-optical-telescope