Australian Synchrotron | Post Terms

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.

In line with the first day of eResearch Australasia, the Australian Synchrotron demonstrates its new data service – Store.Synchrotron with the upload of its first open experiment data.

The Store.Synchrotron service, built on the MyTardis data management system.

This is the first step in a partnership between the Australian Synchrotron and Monash University that leverages the leading Australian eResearch infrastructures of – MyTardis, R@CMon and VicNode, through the support of the NeCTAR and ANDS programs. The goal is to establish a data service, initially for the MX beam line, that captures all research beam line data for analysis, discoverability and re-use. The MX beam line alone means that approximately 1-2TB/month of research data is captured for collaborative use, and managed through the life cycle to the point where data behind important discoveries is one click away to being made open. The Store.Synchrotron pilot has been capturing data for several months, and as of today some collections have progressed from research collaborations to open through Creative Commons licenses.

Monash University is a recognized leader in the creation and management of large scale imaging for research. Store.Synchrotron is a user of the MyTardis service hosted by the Monash eResearch Centre under the leadership of the coordinator of the newly formed Monash Bioinformatics Platform – Steve Androulakis. MyTardis operates on a virtual machine at R@CMon and uses the computational volume storage that is part of the R@CMon/VicNode facility. As the data grows, infrequent data will spill over to vault storage, automating operational efficiencies.

R@CMon

Research @ Cloud Monash

Archives

MyTardis + Salt on R@CMon

Beginnings of a new data service: Store.Synchrotron