eScience ISIS

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e-Science _at_ ISIS
Dr. Kenneth Shankland, ISIS Facility, RALUnited
Kingdom
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CCLRC The Rutherford Appleton Lab
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What is ISIS?
Target station 1 Operation since 1984 50Hz
160kW Thermal neutrons gt 20 instruments
Target station 2 Operation in 2008 10Hz 48kW Cold
neutrons 4 day-one instruments
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A typical instrument _at_ ISIS
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What are we worried about _at_ ISIS ?

• Our current Target Station and instruments
• Our second Target Station and instruments
  experimental programme starts 2008
• Improving operations
• Software in general
• e-Science does not really impinge upon the
  average instrument scientist

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Can e-science help us?

• Data management
• We accept and produce a lot of data
• Data analysis
• We help with the analysis of a lot of data
• Visualisation
• We need to see our data to interact with it

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The five year view wishlist

• Better awareness of the role of e-Science
• Better integration of e-Science effort into
  Facilities
• Better awareness of possibilities offered by
  e-Science
• Modern programming practices and collaborations
• Low activation energy for adoption of e-Science
  technologies

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Making headway

• Data management
• Proposals / ICAT / Data Portal (with KKvD et al.)
• Data analysis
• SXD2001 (with Lakshmi Sastri et al.)
• Visualisation
• eVe (with Lakshmi Sastri et al.)
• Raw power
• SCARF cluster (with Pete Oliver et al.)

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Issues

• Coherence
• Across our Facilities e.g. ISIS / CLF / SRS /
  Diamond
• Acceptance ease-of-use
• Change in working practices e.g. digital
  certificates
• Policy
• New technologies present new opportunities that
  needto be controlled
• Resource
• As new applications become mission critical, they
  need to be fully supported
• Facility character
• Will remote working mean that users no longer
  come to us ?

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The future

• Co-working
• With SNS, J-SNS, Diamond, CLF etc
• Increased resource
• DWF is currently our sole ISIS-specific
  programmer set to change in the near future!
• Education
• New programming practices adopted