A prototype toward Japanese Virtual Observatory (JVO)

The Japanese Virtual Observatory (JVO) aims to provide astronomers to access federated astronomical databases (especially SUBARU, Nobeyama and ALMA) and data analysis environment by using the grid technology. We defined a unified query language to access federated astronomical databases, the JVOQL, and constructed a prototype of the JVO. We adopted Globus Tool Kit 2 (GTK2) in this prototype to see its effectiveness in VO type application, especially for remote operations and file transfers, and UDDI for looking up services. We found that the system worked as we had expected, however, it took very long to initiate each grid process. Thus we replaced the GTK2 with a tool distributed by NSF middleware initiative, and shortened the polling intervals of the job-manager from 30 seconds to 3 seconds. As a result, the serious problem has been partially resolved - the elapsed time for a query became about a half compared with the previous one.