SenseTile Summary

The UCD CASL SenseTile System is a large-scale, general-purpose sensor system installed at the University College Dublin in Dublin, Ireland. Our facility provides a capability, unique in the world in terms of its scale and flexibility, for performing in-depth investigation of both the specific and general issues in large-scale sensor networking.

This system integrates a sensor platform, a datastore, and a compute farm. The sensor platform (called the SenseTile Unit) is a custom-designed, but inexpensive sensor platform. Each unit is composed of one or more SenseTile Sensor Boards paired with a SenseTile Processor Unit, the latter of which includes everything from PDAs to powerful touchscreen-based portable computers. Communication between the Sensor Board and the Processor Unit takes place over a USB bus using a streaming packet-based protocol.

There are over a dozen sensors on the SenseTile Sensor Board itself, and new sensors are added either using expansion slots on the SenseTile Sensor Board, or by adding them directly to the USB bus.

The datastore is a multi-terabyte scale scientific datastore into which sensor data flows, and in which online and offline scientific computation of sensor and other scientific data takes place. The compute farm is a large-scale Linux, Solaris, and Mac OS X-based compute farm used by scientists for these online and offline scientific computations. Our facility aims to provide a scalable and extensible infrastructure for performing in-depth investigation of both the specific and general issues in large-scale sensor networking.

Development of SenseTile is hosted at GitHub.