Integration of the Laboratory Instruments with e-Infrastructure
Marcin Płóciennik, Norbert Meyer, K. Bylec, Szymon Mueller, Marcin Lawenda, Franco Davoli, Alexey Cheptsov, Ioannis Liabotis, Roberto Pugliese, Johannes Watzl, Michael Schiffers · Computational Methods in Science and Technology · 2010
Integration of scientific instruments into e-Infrastructure empowers possibilities in conducting experiments.Access to equipment infrastructures is very often a precondition for successful research in many scientific disciplines.The necessity of using unique and expensive equipment, which is often locally unavailable, is the key issue for the success of a number of experiments.Thus the development and spreading of remote instrumentation techniques and technologies that allow remote and shared access to laboratory instruments opens up new opportunities for researchers.The term instrumentation covers a wide range of laboratory equipment that is necessary for experimental sciences, such as biochemistry, physics and astronomy.Remote instrumentation is the method of providing data acquisition and/or control of scientific instruments from remote locations.Integration with the com-putational infrastructures (Grid, HPC) is used to integrate operations on instruments with computing farms where complex models and computations coming from instruments could run and store a large amount of data.The Grid handles issues related to authorization, resource management, data transfer and storing.The network infrastructure is used with the available mechanism for QoS handling.There are several solutions that aim at realizing complete systems to integrate instruments with e-Infrastructure and build virtual laboratories.While mentioning the most relevant of such systems in the state of the art section, the paper is focusing on the outcome of the EU-funded FP7th project -Deployment of the Remote Instrumentation Infrastructure (DORII).The goal of DORII was to deploy e-Infrastructure for new scientific communities specifically for experimental equipment and instrumentation that are not or only partially integrated with the e-Infrastructure.