e-Infrastructure for Remote Instrumentation

Despite the tremendous growth of the capacity of computation and storage IT solutions over the last years there is still a deep mismatch between the e-Infrastructures and the e-Science applications that use instruments, sensors, and laboratory equipment. The efficiency of using instruments in a remote way, i.e. Remote Instrumentation, might be largely improved by integration with the existing distributed computing and storage infrastructures, like Grids. The paper discusses major activities towards the e-Infrastructure for Remote Instrumentation – a Grid-based Information and Communication Technology environment capable of covering all the issues arising around enabling Remote Instrumentation for e-Science applications.

► Remote Instrumentation (RI) is a concept for controlling distributed instruments.
► RI can greatly be leveraged by the Grid technology.
► We applied RI for a number of real-life applications.
► We discuss hardware, middleware, and networking aspects of RI.
► We discuss a realization of RI in the DORII project.