**NOBUGS 2008 Conference**\\
New Opportunities for Better User Group Software \\
November 3-5, 2008 at [[http://www.ansto.gov.au/|ANSTO]], Australia \\

Roberto Pugliese (ELETTRA) presented the talk:\\

**"Virtual Collaboration Spaces: effective access to the e-Infrastructure"**\\
(Authors: R.Pugliese, M.Prica, A.Del Linz, A.Curri, R.Borghes)\\

__Abstract:__\\

Experimental stations in facilities like Synchrotrons and Free Electron Lasers produce huge quantities of data. These data need to be analyzed on-line, which requires considerable computing power and often teamwork. The problem is even more difficult considering the increased efficiency of the light sources and detectors. Complex calculations are required to take diffraction images and convert them in a 3D protein structure. Similarly, complex calculations are required to calculate tomography and then perform an analysis of the result.

The results of these analyses often need to be visualized by a distributed team and used to modify interactively the data collection strategy. Data from instruments and sensors are saved in distributed repositories, computational models are executed, and finally an interactive data mining process is used to extract useful knowledge.

This kind of application requires both the support of a standard Grid computing environment, that is a virtual organization, a set of distributed storage and computing resources and some resource brokering mechanism, a workflow definition and execution environment and the capability to integrate instruments (the detectors) and interactively collaborate in the data analysis process. QoS handling mechanism is necessary to use effectively the available network structure.

The paper describes how these problems can be solved implementing Virtual Collaboration Spaces and integrating instruments to the e-Infrastructures.

The Instrument Element (IE) is an abstraction of an instrument, sensor or group of instruments and sensors.

An evolution of the IE originally proposed within the GRIDCC project (www.gridcc.org) is being developed within the DORII project (www.dorii.eu). The IE which is now a set of WS-I compliant web services virtualizing the concept of instrument and sensor and presenting this as a grid component that works well in concert with the EGEE gLite software.

The Virtual Control Room (VCR) is a Web-based groupware which provides collaboration support tools to allow people to meet and collaborate (groupware tools, audio and video conference tools) and the foundation to allow teams of people to search, discover, browse, control and manage Grid resources (e.g. job and workflow submission, credential management, file transfer), including remote instrumentation. The VCR can be adopted both as a ready-to-use 'virtual collaboratory', and as a framework that can be extended to develop advanced, application and specific virtual collaboration spaces.

Instrument Element represent the virtualization of the data sources. The potential user community includes all the sources of scientific data from small sensors used in the field of environmental monitoring to large detectors used in the experimental physics.

The VCR is an open source Grid portal based on Gridsphere and Web2.0 technologies. The VCR is supporting fully gLite plus Instrument Elements.

The portal can be easily installed and uses as it is or customized to implement specific Virtual Research Environments.

A powerful scripting environment and an application manager allows a simplified access to the enfrastructure which seams transparent to the user. Interactive application support and a powerful tunneling technique allows the integration of Gridified and not yet Gridified applications is a single environment.

The native integration of collaboration tools (eLogbook, Skupe, EVO, ...) makes the VCR a unique collaboration platform.

The VCR is suitable for any kind of scientific of business application and the respective target communities.