Scientific applications built on wide-area distributed systems such as emerging cloud based architectures and the legacy grid computing infrastructure often struggle with user adoption even though they succeed from a systems research perspective. This paper examines the coupling of user-centered design processes with modern distributed systems. Further in this paper, we describe approaches for conceptualizing a product that solves a recognized need: to develop a data gateway to serve the data management and research needs of experimentalists of electron microscopes and similar shared scientific instruments in the context of a research service laboratory. The purpose of the data gateway is to provide secure, controlled access to data generated from a wide range of scientific instruments. From the functional perspective, we focus on the basic processing of raw data that underlies the lab's "business" processes, the movement of data from the laboratory to central access and archival storage points, and the distribution of data to respective authorized users. Through the gateway interface, users will be able to share the instrument data with collaborators or copy it to remote storage servers. Basic pipelines for extracting additional metadata (through a pluggable parser framework) will be enabled. The core contribution described in this paper, building on the aforementioned distributed data management capabilities, is the adoption of user-centered design processes for developing the scientific user interface. We describe the user-centered design methodology for exploring user needs, iteratively testing the design, learning from user experiences, and adapting what we learn to improve design and capabilities. We further conclude that user-centered design is, in turn, best enabled by an adaptable distributed systems framework. A key challenge to implementing a user-centered design is to have design tools closely linked with a software system architecture that can evolve over time while providing a highly available data gateway. A key contribution of this paper is to share the insights from crafting such an evolvable design-build-evaluate-deploy architecture and plans for iterative development and deployment.

A two component portal system is being developed for collaborative remote instrument and data control and monitoring. The system builds on and enhances the common instrument middleware architecture (CIMA) model for Web services based monitoring of remote scientific instruments and sensors. The architecture supports remote access to multiple instruments from a single portal. Plugin modules are used to provide flexibility and re-use, and the notion of plugin control is being developed. The use of Web 2.0 Pushlet and AJAX technologies has been introduced for push based portlet refresh and updating. An X3D based 3D virtual representation of the instrument provides data collection simulation and (pseudo) real time instrument representation. An important component of the system is a Webs services driven portlet for collaborative image viewing.

Abstract The Common Instrument Middleware Architecture (CIMA) aims at integrating instruments and sensors into computing and storage Grids through a standard interface methodology that existing and future instrument facilities can provide. This instrument interface provides a base which data acquisition and reduction applications can rely on as the design of the underlying facilities evolves and changes. After connecting instruments and sensors in a reliable and secure manner to applications, the next step is to integrate instruments, data acquisition, reduction and analysis applications with community provided resources such as application servers, temporary and archival storage. Practices and workflows at the instrument facilities also need to be captured and presented to users. Portals provide a natural approach to a ‘community’ interface to instrument and sensor facilities. Here we describe the CIMA Crystallography portal, a portal based on GridSphere that provides a user interface to equipment and workflows for a global federation of crystallography laboratories. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The Common Instrument Middleware Architecture (CIMA) is being used as a core component of a portal based remote instrument access system being developed as an Australian e-Science project. The CIMA model is being enhanced to use federated Grid storage infrastructure (SRB), and the Kepler workflow system to, as much as possible, automate data management, and the facile extraction and generation of instrument and experimental metadata. The Personal Grid Library is introduced as a user friendly portlet interface to SRB data and metadata, and which supports customisable metadata schemas. An Instrument Instruction Module has been introduced as a CIMA plug-in for instrument control. A virtual instrument portlet provides a simulation of the instrument during a data collection. The system is being further augmented with a tool for collaborative data visualisation and evaluation.

Instruments and sensors are the primary sources of data driving science and the development and refinement of theory. A critical component of eresearch yet to be clarified is the role of instruments in cyberinfrastructure. Are instruments, sensors and other real-time data sources to be mediated by file systems, or can they be fully integrated into computing and storage grids with appropriate protocol standards? Our position is that they can and must become regular grid resources and that standards for doing so represent an important research topic. Our approach, the Common Instrument Middleware Architecture, and a model application, X-ray crystallography, are described here in order to stimulate a broader discussion of requirements for grid-enabling instruments and sensors.

Instruments and sensors and their accompanying actuators are essential to the conduct of scientific research. In many cases they provide observations in electronic format and can be connected to computer networks with varying degrees of remote interactivity. These devices vary in their architectures and type of data they capture and may generate data at various rates. In this paper we present an overview of the design goals and initial implementation of the common instrument middleware architecture (CIMA), a framework for making instruments and sensors network accessible in a standards-based, uniform way, and for interacting remotely with instruments and the data they produce. Some of the issues CIMA addresses include: flexibility in network transport, efficient and high throughput data transport, the availability (or lack of) computational, storage and networking resources at the instrument or sensor platform, evolution of instrument design, and reuse of data acquisition and processing codes

Recent developments in high speed networks on both sides of the Pacific including the vBNS, and the Abilene project in the US, and the Asia-Pacific Advanced Network (APAN) in the AP region, have been driven by the emergence of high speed networking as a central requirement for the support of basic science, engineering and other disciplines. The growth of international scientific collaborations in, for example, astronomy, high energy physics, medicine, and computational science leads to a requirement for a global data communications infrastructure on par with what is available domestically. This paper describes the establishment of a high bandwidth international Internet connection from the vBNS and other US networks to the Asia Pacific Advanced Network (APAN) and some of the applications driving this development.