Adapters for External Resources and Services

The INTERSECT architecture offers a way to construct a federated ecosystem by connecting scientific instruments, computational resources and data resources to enable science breakthroughs with autonomous experiments, self-driving laboratories, smart manufacturing, and AI-driven design, discovery and evaluation. It uses a novel Concept that relies on a System-of-Systems Architecture. The federated ecosystem, i.e., the overall system in the System-of-Systems Architecture, is decomposed into many smaller and easier to design systems that coordinate activities with each other using standardized communication and programming interfaces.

Adapter

The Systems, Subsystems, and Services in the System-of-Systems Architecture of the INTERSECT federated ecosystem utilize and integrate external resources or services using adapters. An adapter is a service that bridges the communication gap between INTERSECT Systems, Subsystems, and Services and external resources and services by exposing the external capabilities to the federated ecosystem using the standardized INTERSECT communication and programming interfaces. An adapter needs to offer certain basic services of the Infrastructure Management System, in addition to any other services. While adapter implementation solutions may be reused for the same or similar resource and service types, each resource and service requires its own adapter instance. An instance may be used simultaneously in different contexts, or different instances may use the same resource or service, each instance with its own context.

Instrument Adapter

The most prominent instance of an adapter is an instrument adapter. It exposes the capabilities of an instrument to the INTERSECT System-of-Systems Architecture. This essentially makes the instrument an INTERSECT infrastructure system and embeds the instrument into the INTERSECT System-of-Systems Architecture with certain logical systems and corresponding subsystems and services.

Other Resource or Service Adapters

Many other adapters exist, such as for compute and data storage resources, or for services that offer needed capabilities. These adapters integrate these resources and services into the INTERSECT federated ecosystem as infrastructure systems and expose their capabilities.

Minimum requrement

At minimum, adapters are used to integrate external resources and services with the INTERSECT federated ecosystem to prevent the proliferation of proprietary architecture features, such as incompatible services and APIs, to other Systems, Subsystems, and Services. External (non-INTERSECT) architecture features must remain outside the INTERSECT federated ecosystem boundary and be made compatible at that boundary.

Optional requrement

Optionally, INTERSECT Systems, Subsystems, and Services are adopted when integrating external resources and services, removing the need for adapters and making them fully compatible with the INTERSECT federated ecosystem and expanding the ecosystem’s boundary.