{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/sma-x-versatile-information-sharing-in-and","title":"SMA-X: Versatile information sharing in and around telescopes, and beyond","arxiv_id":"2501.02328","date":"2025-01-04","proceeding":null,"authors":["Attila Kovács","Paul K. Grimes","Christopher Moriarty","Robert Wilson"],"abstract":"We developed the SMA eXchange (SMA-X) as a real-time data sharing solution, built atop a central Redis database. SMA-X is a storage convention, facilitated by a set of server-side Lua scripts (or Redis functions) which enable efficient low-latency and high-throughput real-time sharing of hierarchically structured data among the various systems and subsystems of the telescope. It enables fast, atomic retrievals of specific leaf elements, branches, and sub-trees, including associated metadata (types, dimensions, timestamps, and origins, and more). At the Submillimer Array (SMA) we rely on it since 2021 to share a diverse set of ~10,000 real-time variables, including arrays, across more than 100 computers, with information being published every 10 ms in some cases. SMA-X is open-source, and is freely available to everyone through a set of public GitHub repositories, including C/C++ and Python3 libraries to allow integration with observatory applications. A set of command-line tools provide access to the database from the POSIX shell and/or from any scripting language, and we also provide a configurable system daemon for archiving the observatory state at regular intervals into a time-series Structured Query Language (SQL) database to create a detailed historical record.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.02328v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.02328v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"sma-x-versatile-information-sharing-in-and","repo_url":"https://github.com/Smithsonian/smax-clib","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}