VII ALMA Common Software (ACS) Workshop

The ALMA Common Software Workshop is a five-day event, organized by the Computer and Systems Engineering Department of the UCN], the [[http://alma.inf.utfsm.cl|ALMA-UTFSM Group, and ALMA. The workshop will be held from November 15th to 19th, 2010at the Universidad Católica del Norte (UCN), located in Antofagasta (Chile), as part of the JCC (Jornadas Chilenas de la Computación) Conference.

This Workshop expects to gather together ACS developers and current and potential users, with the goal of introducing them to the ACS framework, discussing about its current development status, and exploring ideas about how ACS could be used by other projects outside ALMA.

The Workshop consists of one day of introductory talks, followed by a four-days practical ACS course, a guided hands-on work to learn about development of distributed ACS components and services.

The organization is based on previous ones that have been taking place at ESO Headquarters in Garching, Germany between 2004 and 2007, and at UTFSM from 2007 to 2009.

The ALMA Common Software (ACS) is a CORBA-based distributed framework that provides a common and homogeneous infrastructure for the whole software of the ALMA project, from high-level data flow applications down to instrument control. As the potential of the ACS subsystem goes beyond astronomic instrumentation, it can be used in other distributed system developments, outside ALMA.

Today, ACS involves a worldwide community of developers and users, including various scientific projects and universities.

More details in http://acsworkshop.disc.ucn.cl/.