IGWN low-latency data¶

Many IGWN research goals are time-critical, and so a system to distribute data in extremely low-latency is maintained to enable rapid analysis and dissimination of information.

Low-latency strain data¶

Strain data are generated by automated calibration processes at each observatory and collected in 1-second packets, together with useful state and data quality information.

These 1-second data packets are formatted as Frame structures (see LIGO-T970130) and published into a Kafka model. Consumers of low-latency data should then subscribe to the relevant Kafka topic to receive the data.

The data are also written as 1-second GWF files to the /dev/shm/kafka shared-memory partition on a number of machines in the IGWN computing grid from which they can be read using traditional file I/O routines.

Low-latency instrumental data¶

In order to support low-latency data quality studies, a subset of the full raw dataset are distributed in low-latency.