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CHEP95- Slides for Plenary Paper #12 - Tools for Building Virtual Laboratories
Stu Loken(1)
Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, University of California
Information and Computing Sciences Division
Table of Contents
Tools for Building Virtual Laboratories
CHEP '95 - Plenary #12 - Tools for Building Virtual Laboratories
Easily and flexibly assembled, powerful and general purpose laboratory data analysis systems, regardless of the location of the components or the principals
- Network-based: Storage and compute servers are the building blocks for data access and analysis
- Remote operation: Will enable the "virtual laboratory"
- Video streams: collect, analyze, present, employ, and archive visual data
- Integration of computational and laboratory science
- Remote collaboration and distributed information sharing
- Wide area network-based remote control
- Configurable large-scale storage systems
- Configurable high performance computing systems
- Digital video as a "normal" data type
- High speed device I/O via the network
- Distributed collaboratory and information sharing environments
- The World Wide Web as an image and multimedia session database
.
- Five projects, beginning in early 1995 and running for about two years, will build and operate testbeds for "collaboratories." (See: http://www-itg.lbl.gov)
- The testbeds will provide remote access to the kinds of expensive, hard-to-duplicate facilities, ranging from electron microscopes to a tokamak fusion reactor
- By building these testbeds and using them for real-world experiments, we will be able to study both the technical and the social aspects of controlling apparatus, taking data, and interacting with colleagues by wire.
- Electron microscopy, physics, and object-oriented virtual reality: Argonne National Laboratory.
A shared work space with persistence and history will add a virtual-reality/multi-user dimensions touch to this project. A later phase will exercise the idea of a Collaboratory internationally across a data link of varying bandwidth.
- Remote control for fusion experiments: Livermore, Princeton, Oak Ridge, and General Atomics.
This testbed will attempt to replicate the function and feeling of real-time presence in a control room at a tokamak, a quintessentially large central facility to which today's researchers must travel.
- Remote collaboration for environmental molecular sciences: Pacific Northwest Laboratories.
The two parts of this testbed will serve, respectively, large, highly shared NMR facilities and smaller-scale molecular-beam instruments with small user groups.
- Remote SpectroMicroscopy at the Advanced Light Source: University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory
Distinctive features of this project include a large and geographically distributed collaboration, which is part of a much broader (and rapidly expanding) user community in the field of synchrotron radiation.
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- Goals:
- Demonstrate basic remote control and collaboration
- Build modular versatile tools that others can use
- Effectiveness evaluation
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- Remote experiment monitoring and control
- On-line laboratory notebook
- Tele-presence
- Security for access control, safety, and data confidentially
- Collaboration between multiple researchers at multiple sites
- Cross-platform compatibility (PC, Sun, Macintosh)
- Maintainability
- Interface coherence and usability
- Control coordination
- Access from industrial sites
- Current hardware and software technology
- networks - XUNet, Energy Sciences Network, and Internet
- multicast protocols - Multicast Backbone, Totem
- video conferencing tools - vic, nv, CUSeeMe, nevot, ivs and vat
- robotic remotely controlled cameras
- Existing instrument control system (Labview)
- Distributed system tools (OSF/DCE)
- security (Kerberos, DES, RSA)
- shared file system (DFS)
- On-line notebook
- Multicast data dissemination tools
- Resource arbitrator
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- Distributed experiment control
- Session control
- Coherent user interface
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- Labview split into client and server provides
- instrument control
- instrument monitoring
- user interface
- same control software running at all sites
- Communication using TCP, UDP, multicast IP
- Video
- camera at workstation
- robotic cameras for area shots (remotely controlled)
- data cameras monitoring sample chamber
- remotely controlled video switch
- Audio
- wireless microphone/speaker sets
- audio mixer
- Software tools
- vic, vat, wb, CU-SeeMe, nevot, ivs
- Automated and manual data entry
- File reference capability
- Cut and paste of pictures/images
- Search functions
- Custom forms for formatted entry
- Sketching/drawing capability
- Scientific characters and symbols
- Security/access restriction
- Easy interface to other software packages (Labview, statistics, graphics)
- Resource arbitrator runs locally at each site
- Monitor: status of resources
- Arbitrate: current controller
- Negotiate: pending requests
- Security and safety concerns
- network-based tampering
- automated equipment failure modes
- sanity checks on incoming data
- Safety architecture
- safety mechanisms built into server control software
- fail-safe recovery mechanisms on experiment server
- Security architecture
- local security server at each site
- DCE/Kerberos
- Data encryption
- Multimedia conferencing
- Experiment parameters
- Experiment results
- Collaboratory control information
- Security information
- Notebook updates and transactions
- Status displays
- unreliable unordered
- reliable ordered
- Periodically updated parameters and global settings
- Points on a graph or notebook entries
- reliable unordered
- reliable ordered
- Experiment parameters (one-shot) and incremental values
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- Data transmission
- 512 x 512 array of 32 bits in 30 seconds 280 Kbps
- other data 8 - 80 Kbps
- Video / image transmission
- Video images of sample positions (optical microscope):
- greyscale, 512x492, 1 - 5 Hz 2 Mbps-10 Mbps
- Experiment chamber monitor (video):
- greyscale, 512x492, 1 Hz 2 Mbps
- Video conferencing:
- compressed video transmission 128 Kbps
- The Image Server System (ISS) is a network-striped disk array designed to supply high speed data streams to other processes in the network.
- The ISS uses parallel, distributed servers to supply image streams fast enough to enable various multi-user, "real-time", virtual reality-like applications in an Internet / ATM environment.
- Functionally, the ISS is a persistent cache of named objects
(It is not a reliable tertiary storage system).
- High speed networks
- Improved network and data handling protocols
- Videoconferencing and telepresence
- Effective security and safety mechanisms
- Large scale prototypes
- Remote experiment control
- Collaborative tools
Footnotes
- (1)
- scloken@lbl.gov, 510-486-7171, http://www.lbl.gov
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