AstroCloud, a Cyber-Infrastructure for Astronomy Research: Architecture

AstroCloud is a cyber-Infrastructure for Astronomy Research initiated by Chinese Virtual Observatory (China-VO) under funding support from NDRC (National Development and Reform commission) and CAS (Chinese Academy of Sciences). The ultimate goal of this project is to provide a comprehensive end-to-end astronomy re- search environment where several independent systems seamlessly collaborate to sup- port the full lifecycle of the modern observational astrono my based on big data, from proposal submission, to data archiving, data release, and t o in-situ data analysis and processing. In this paper, the architecture and key designs of the AstroCloud platform are introduced, including data access middleware, access control and security frame- work, extendible proposal workflow, and system integration mechanism.