Remote instrumentation infrastructure for e-Science. Approach of the DORII project

Whereas the available resources and storage capabilities constitute the most important limitation for researchers in experiments to be performed, increasing availability of high-performance computing resources, provided by the Grid, has allowed many e-Science communities to proceed with new challenging experiments, especially involving expense and complex specialized measurement instrumentation and pervasive large-scale data acquisition platforms. Remote instrumentation, which means providing control of distributed scientific instruments by users from remote locations, is an important part of functionality that applications, developed in a number of e-Science domains (among others, environmental science, earthquake engineering, experimental science), are supposed to provide. The EC-funded Deployment of Remote Instrumentation Infrastructure (DORII) project aims to establish a new e-Infrastructure which allows the applications to provide remote instrumentation services in high-performance Grid computing environments. The paper presents basic aspects of the Remote Instrumentation Infrastructure deployment and further use with respect to requirements of specific application fields of e-Science.