E-science technologies in synchrotron radiation beamline — remote access and automation (A case study for high throughput protein crystallography)

Abstract

E-science refers to the large-scale science that will increasingly be carried out through distributed global collaborations enabled by the Internet. The Grid is a service-oriented architecture proposed to provide access to very large data collections, very large scale computing resources and remote facilities. Web services, which are server applications, enable online access to service providers. Web portal interfaces can further hide the complexity of accessing facility’s services. The main use of synchrotron radiation (SR) facilities by protein crystallographers is to collect the best possible diffraction data for reasonably well defined problems. Significant effort is therefore being made throughout the world to automate SR protein crystallography facilities so scientists can achieve high throughput, even if they are not expert in all the techniques. By applying the above technologies, the e-HTPX project, a distributed computing infrastructure, was designed to help scientists remotely plan, initiate and monitor experiments for protein crystallographic structure determination. A description of both the hardware and control software is given together in this paper.