Experiences from Cyberinfrastructure Development for Multi-user Remote Instrumentation

Computer-controlled scientific instruments such as electron microscopes, spectrometers, and telescopes are expensive to purchase and maintain. Also, they generate large amounts of raw and processed data that has to be annotated and archived. Cyber-enabling these instruments and their data sets using remote instrumentation cyberinfrastructures can improve user convenience and significantly reduce costs. In this paper, we discuss our experiences in gathering technical and policy requirements of remote instrumentation for research and training purposes. Next, we describe the cyberinfrastructure solutions we are developing for supporting related multi-user workflows. Finally, we present our solution-deployment experiences in the form of case studies. The case studies cover both technical issues (bandwidth provisioning, collaboration tools, data management, system security) and policy issues (service level agreements, use policy, usage billing). Our experiences suggest that developing cyberinfrastructures for remote instrumentation requires: (a) understanding and overcoming multi-disciplinary challenges, (b) developing reconfigurable-and-integrated solutions, and (c) close collaborations between instrument labs, infrastructure providers, and application developers.