ELETTRA

ELETTRA is a national laboratory located in the outskirts of Trieste (Italy). Its mandate is a scientific service to the Italian and international research communities, based on the development and open use of light produced by synchrotron and Free Electron Lasers (FEL) sources. The ELETTRA infrastructure consists of a State of the art (2-2.4) GeV electron storage ring and about 30 synchrotron radiation beam lines with 13 insertion devices. ELETTRA covers the needs of a wide variety of experimental techniques and scientific fields, including photoemission and spectromicroscopy, macromolecular crystallography, low-angle scattering, dichroic absorption spectroscopy, and x-ray imaging serving the communities of materials science, surface science, solid-state chemistry, atomic and molecular physics, structural biology, and medicine. ELETTRA is now building a new light source called FERMI@Elettra which is a single-pass FEL user-facility covering the wavelength range from 100 nm (12 eV) to 10 nm (124 eV). This new research frontier of ultra-fast VUV and X-ray science drives the development of a novel source for the generation of femtosecond pulses. At ELETTRA each beamline has its own acquisition system based on different platforms (java, LabVIEW, IDL, python, etc.). To offer a uniform environment to the users where they can operate and store data, ELETTRA has developed the Virtual Collaboratory Room (VCR) that, among other things, allows users to remotely collaborate and operate the instrumentation. This system is a web portal where the user can find all the necessary tools and applications; i.e. the acquisition application, the data storage, the computation and analysis, the access of remote devices and almost everything necessary for the completion of the experiment. The system implements an Automatic Authentication and Authorization (AAA) based on the credential managed by the Virtual Unified Office (VUO). The VUO web application handles the complete workflow of the proposals' submission, evaluations, and scheduling. The system can provide administrational and logistical support i.e. accommodation, subsistence, access to the ELETTRA site. The participating team has gained experience in Grids by participating in a set of FP6 EU founded projects like EGEE-II (Enabling Grids for E-SciencE), GRIDCC (Grid Enabled Instrumentation with Distributed Control and Computation) and EUROTeV. GRIDCC introduced the concept of Grid enabled instrument and sensor which is extremely important for industrial applications. Experience gained in FP6 projects is being capitalised as ELETTRA is also participating in the DORII project (Deployment of Remote Instrumentation Infrastructure) and in the Italian Grid Infrastructure. ELETTRA hosts a Grid Virtual Organization (including all the necessary VO-wide elements like VOMS, WMS, BDII, LB, LFC, etc.) and provides resources for several VOs. The current effort is on porting many legacy applications to a Grid computing paradigm in an effort to satisfy demanding computational needs (e.g. tomography reconstruction).