Building a Data Grid for the Australian Microscopy and Microanalysis Research Facility

This paper describes the architecture and services developed by the ARC Special Research Initiative GRANI project for the Australian Nanostructural Analysis Network Organization. The aim of GRANI was to provide the NANO community with a scalable, distributed data management solution and a secure collaborative environment to ensure high speed, seamless sharing of their data, instruments, analystical services and expertise. A grid-enabled, distributed system has been developed that links the major Australian microscopy instruments to an underlying distributed national imagery database, a network of microscopy experts and analytical services through an authenticated Web Portal. The aspects that are particularly innovative and that will be described in depth include: The Nano Image Database (NIDB) – that provides indexed, storage and access to a distributed archive of images captured directly from the advanced instruments and archived in the National Data Facility via Gridftp; Access to APAC’s high performance computing (HPC) facilities and grid environment for high speed file movement, image analysis and 3D reconstruction; Real-time video conferencing and video annotation services to support remote access to advanced microscopy instruments.