This led to a first refinement of the originally proposed architecture (see Figure 2). A core idea is to establish well-defined interfaces for all database components in our system, while the processing components are free in what they are doing as long as they adapt to the database components.

Figure 2: Revised version of the initial FLARECAST architecture. The Management Infrastructure and step 1 are under the responsibility of WP4, step 2 will be managed by WP2, Step 3 by WP3 and Step 4 by WP5.

The actual infrastructure is built on Docker containers, a collection of lightweight, linux-based computing containers, each either holding an algorithm or a database component. These containers can be deployed to any development system.