Physical View

The physical view provides a mapping of the architecture onto the physical infrastructure. This view of the environment enables system designers to determine how to decompose and place the various system components onto the resources that make up the overall system. This view provides the architecture with an understanding of the attributes of the environment and allows the system to configure its services based on the constraints and capabilities of the underlying system components. The elements in this view consist of physical resources that provide services to the architecture as well as the network topology that connects them together. Types of physical resources include computational resources, data storage services, data sources, and network connections.

The physical view enables the enumeration of constraints placed on the overall system. These constraints can consist of capacity constraints (e.g., available storage capacity or computational elements), network constraints (e.g., available bandwidth between elements in the architecture), policy constraints (e.g., firewall rules or access control policies), and availability constraints (e.g., ability to allocate resources within necessary time frames). These constraints limit the configuration space of the architecture, and enumerate the necessary interfaces and processes required to configure the physical infrastructure to support the operations of the overall system.

Some of the items associated with the physical view are:

  • Descriptions, definitions of physical systems

  • Descriptions of networks and connectivity of systems

  • Descriptions of organizational boundaries

Some of the items not associated with the physical view are:

  • Specifications for instruments, resources, etc.

  • Specifications for experiments

  • Specifications for data

  • Specifications for the logical view

This view should be read by resource managers/owners, system administrators, network engineers, and facility space managers. The phyiscal view is inherently site specific and provides a framework for describing the organization and technical challenges that must be addressed to deploy the architecture described in this document. The contents of this section will provide insight to stakholders to describe general challanges and concerns that must be addressed, as well as outline processes for fully developing the physical view for potential deployment sites.

The current physical view offers a guide on Developing the Physical View for indivual realizations of the INTERSECT ecosystem parts, i.e., participations of indivual institutions in the federated ecosystem.