Telescience Portal

The Telescience(TM) Project

https://telescience.ucsd.edu/

Widespread use of specialized instruments or facilities is often impeded by the need for scientists to travel to the instrument site to perform their research. The creation of a cyberinfrastructure for telescience promises enhanced control over experiment preparation, data collection, data processing, and data management, as well as increased access to specialized resources including high-voltage electron microscopes, Grid computing for data analysis and visualization, and databases for online comparisons of acquired images.

The Telescience Project is merging technologies for remote control, Grid computing, and federated digital libraries of multiscale, cell-structure data. The objective is to provide a complete teleinstrumentation solution that will connect scientists’ desktops to remote instruments, distributed databases, high-performance analysis environments, and experiment planning. The Telescience system is designed to increase the throughput of data acquisition and processing and ultimately improve the accuracy of the final data product.

The Telescience Portal, the interface for the Telescience Project, consolidates access for controlling instruments remotely, managing data, and controlling batch jobs with a single login and password. The Portal walks the user through the complex process of remote data acquisition via Telemicroscopy; Globus-enabled parallel tomographic reconstruction; advanced visualization, segmentation, and data processing tools; and transparent deposition of data products into federated libraries of cellular structure. Key features of the Portal include personalized user information, collaboration tools–such as chat and shared white boards, automatic storage of data with the Storage Resource Broker, and job tracking tools.