RMIT MicroTardis

MicroTardis is the customisation and deployment of MyTardis, a data-management portal originally developed for protein crystallography at Monash University, for use in microscopy at RMIT. A proof-of-concept installation was deployed in RMMF (RMIT Microscopy and Microanalysis Facility) in 2010, but insufficient resources were available to make it production ready. As a result of collaboration with VeRSI, resources are now available to complete the original vision.

Vision

Prior to MicroTardis, the researcher’s workflow looked like this:

1. Carry out experiment using control PC.
2. Copy data onto USB stick.
3. Take USB stick elsewhere for further processing and unmanaged data archival.

With MicroTardis, the workflow will look like this:

1. Carry out experiment using control PC.
2. Save data into MicroTardis-accessible area of PC.
3. (MicroTardis harvests and processes data to staging area.)
4. On PC, ingest data into Tardis, adding appropriate metadata.
5. Access data as desired.

Benefits to researchers include:

• Consistent curation of data and ability to easily find and retrieve it in subsequent years.
• Fewer manual steps in data management.
• Reduced risk of virus infection due to use of USB sticks, and hence less time spent performing antivirus software maintenance.
• Improved research quality due to greater traceability of results.

Aims and objectives

Major objective:

• To run MicroTardis in a production environment, automatically harvesting microscopy data from at least two instruments and performing a useful service for researchers.

Secondary objectives:

• Customisation of MicroTardis to meet the needs of microscopy researchers.
• Deployment to further instruments (potentially eight in total).
• Use of RMIT petabyte store as permanent storage for MicroTardis data.
• Integration with scheduling system to retrieve relevant metadata.
• Implementation of explicit data back-up and recovery procedures.

Collaboration

VeRSI is collaborating with the University of Queensland's Centre for Microscopy and Microanalysis, which has also begun deploying MyTardis for microscopy users. Since the pilot began, the Monash Centre for Electron Microscopy has also begun a trial deployment of MicroTardis. This will be carried out by the Monash e-Research Centre, with some assistance from VeRSI.

Project details

This Project has now been completed

Lead institute  RMIT

Principal investigator  Professor Dougal McCulloch

Partner sponsor  Professor Heinz Schmidt

VeRSI executive sponsor  Dr Ann Borda – VeRSI Executive Director

VeRSI project management  Steve Bennett – VeRSI Business Analyst

Brief summary of project  Deployment and customisation of MyTardis for researchers in the RMIT Microscopy and Microanalysis Facility (RMMF).

Keywords: RMIT | MicroTardis | Data | Management | MyTardis | Microscopy | Collaboration | VeRSI | Access | Research