The Australian Synchrotron generates terabytes of data daily from a range of scientific instruments. In the past, this crucially important data often ended up on old disk drives, unlabelled and offline. This makes sharing and referencing of the data very difficult if not impossible. MyTardis was developed as a web application geared towards receiving data from scientific instruments such as those at the Australian Synchrotron in an automated fashion. This enables researchers to facilitate the organisation, long-term archival and sharing of data with collaborators. MyTardis also allows researchers to cite their data. This has been done for publications in high impact journals such as Science and Nature. Refer to this previous post highlighting Australian Synchrotron’s new data service using MyTardis, R@CMon and VicNode. 

A data publication for Astronomy

Deploying MyTardis for development use or on a multi-node cloud setup is made easier with the use of automated configuration management tools. MyTardis is now using Salt for its configuration management, which is gaining popularity for its accessibility and simplicity. More information about deploying MyTardis on various platforms and how it uses Salt is available in this story. The following diagram provides an overview of MyTardis deployment architecture on the NeCTAR Research Cloud.

MyTardis Deployment Architecture

Since its creation, development and deployment of MyTardis have expanded to other universities, scientific facilities and institutions to fulfil the data management requirements across research areas such as microscopy, microanalysis, particle physics, next-generation sequencing and medical imaging. An up-to-date list of scientific instruments integrated with MyTardis is included in this story on the MyTardis site.