Connecting users to instruments and sensors: portals as multi-user GUIs for instrument and sensor facilities

The Common Instrument Middleware Architecture (CIMA) aims at integrating instruments and sensors into computing and storage Grids through a standard interface methodology that existing and future instrument facilities can provide. This instrument interface provides a base which data acquisition and reduction applications can rely on as the design of the underlying facilities evolves and changes. After connecting instruments and sensors in a reliable and secure manner to applications, the next step is to integrate instruments, data acquisition, reduction and analysis applications with community provided resources such as application servers, temporary and archival storage. Practices and workflows at the instrument facilities also need to be captured and presented to users. Portals provide a natural approach to a ‘community’ interface to instrument and sensor facilities. Here we describe the CIMA Crystallography portal, a portal based on GridSphere that provides a user interface to equipment and workflows for a global federation of crystallography laboratories. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.