TARDIS Ruggedisation

TARDIS (formerly an acronym for The Australian Repositories for Diffraction ImageS) was created by Ashley Buckle and Steve Androulakis in 2008, in a protein crystallography/molecular biology lab at Monash University. Its original purpose was the storage and dissemination of public datasets containing raw crystallography data (known as diffraction images), along with rich metadata for search and persistent handles for citation in publications.

The related MyTARDIS project arose from ANDS-funded activity and virtual beamline (VBL) development at the Australian Synchrotron. MyTARDIS is a repository that allows anyone with a synchrotron login to access their macromolecular crystallography data collected off its instruments with the full capabilities available to TARDIS.edu.au.

Both projects have provided data-curation and transfer benefits to researchers at the Synchrotron and several other sites, and in several disciplines. However, reliability of TARDIS, for example for its key protein crystallography researchers in Monash University’s Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, remains low.

This lack of take-up is largely due to a need to improve reliability in error detection, data transfer, reporting and recovery features. The proposed work is to address these issues and to support uptake by the Monash protein crystallography researchers and the broader scientific community.

Aims and objectives

This project has three broad aims:

Improve reliability of MyTardis for the Monash protein crystallography researchers.
Improve user confidence in MyTardis.
Support wider community uptake.

That is, not only must the software be reliable, but users must also know that it is reliable, and have confidence that any failures will be immediately reported and swiftly rectified.

Project details

ID number MU/P/017

Project title Monash TARDIS Ruggedisation

Start date September 2011 End Date June 2012

Lead institute Monash University

Principal investigator Associate Professor Ashley Buckle – NHMRC Senior Research Monash University, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology

Partner PIs and/or participating institutions Associate Professor Ashley Buckle (Monash); Prof Paul Bonnington (Monash eResearch Centre); Steve Androulakis (Monash eResearch Centre); Dr. Ulrich Felzmann (Australian Synchrotron)

Partner sponsor Paul Bonnington – Monash eResearch Centre

Partner project management Steve Androulakis – Monash eResearch Centre

VeRSI executive sponsor Dr Ann Borda – VeRSI Executive Director

VeRSI project management Steve Bennett – VeRSI Business Analyst

Brief summary of project Improving reliability of the Monash MyTardis instance by implementing error detection, and reporting and recovery features. By the end of the project: users will be fully informed about the status of data transfers; system administrators will be notified of any failures; integrity checks will detect errors earlier; a message queueing system will improve reliability of data transfers; new reporting features will enable greater visibility of the usage of MyTardis as a whole.

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TARDIS Ruggedisation