Toward Standards for Integration of Instruments into Grid Computing Environments

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.