Science of remote instruments

ANYL 363

James D. Myers, jimmyers@ncsa.uiuc.edu and Umesh Thakkar. NCSA, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1205 W. Clark St., MC-257, Urbana, IL 61801
Providing remote network access to scientific instruments has become dramatically easier over the last decade, yet the number of successful remote instrument projects is still relatively small. Drawing on experiences from multiple projects, including Pacific Northwest National Laboratory's Virtual NMR Facility and the University of Illinois' Bugscope, we present some social and technical lessons-learned in delivering real scientific and educational value using remote instruments. These lessons further motivate an introduction of NCSA/UIUC's concept for flexible next-generation cyberenvironments that emphasize distributed scientific processes involving instruments, colleagues, data, and computational resources, rather than focusing on access to remote resources.