Large-scale experimental facilities such as the ILL are designed to accommodate thousands of international visitors, often from over 40 countries each year. There is great value in users taking an active role in the neutron experiments, and the joint work with instrument scientists builds collaborations that can last a whole career.
Despite the annual influx of international visitors, there has always been interest in options that don’t require users to travel to ILL. Remote access to instruments, experiments, and datasets would unlock scientific opportunities for those less able to travel, as well as enable more flexible working patterns for staff.
Global challenges, including climate change and COVID-19, have accelerated the development of platforms to enable world-leading research to take place in the face of reduced travel and national lock-downs.
Reducing the requirement for researchers to be at ILL physically would also cut the costs, traffic, and environmental impact of commuting for staff and users alike. This would lower the threshold of investment needed to use the facility for scientific discovery and analysis, which may open up the doors to a wider and more diverse user community.
Remote access systems can also increase the efficiency of experiments. For experiments that last a long time, sometimes up to several days, ILL scientists can check regularly on the progress of the analysis from the comfort of their own homes, adjusting the instrument remotely if needed.
The advancement of a platform for remote control of experiments won’t change how ILL will welcome its users in the future – the community in Grenoble will always be ready to support visitors from around the globe to exchange world-changing scientific ideas and reveal the inner workings of the universe.
The remote access platform will be an additional asset, that can act as a solution to global or personal challenges that may otherwise limit access to the facility. With remote access, more persons can actively participate in a given experiment.
What does remote access look like at the ILL?
The IT team at ILL have created the VISA platform (Virtual Infrastructure for Scientific Analysis) to enable academic and industrial researchers to access data and analysis tools remotely. The cloud-based application does not require the use of high-powered computers – only a web browser and an internet connection. It can provide the same experience for users at home as though they were carrying out their data analysis at the facility.
As an all-in-one package, VISA makes it easy for everyone in one proposal team to collaborate on the analysis of the same datasets by allowing members of the team and instrument scientists to share the same analysis environment in real time.
Data acquisition as well as analysis
The VISA platform also supplements the development of NOMAD Remote, an extension of the instrument control software, that enables researchers to take control of many of the ILL’s 40 state-of-the-art instruments from afar, with continued hands-on support from ILL’s expert instrument scientists.
Created by the Instrument Control (SCI) team at the ILL, NOMAD Remote is a ground-breaking advance in remote access to neutron techniques, allowing teams from across academia and industry to continue to access ILL’s extensive range of experimental environments without needing to go to Grenoble, France.
VISA and NOMAD Remote have been optimised to be of the highest security standards for data, and access to the instrument is carefully prioritised and authenticated so that staff and users may carry out studies with confidence.
The ILL is the first facility able to offer remote access tools with such an advanced level of security, permission control, along with robust storage and processing capacities. Everything was developed in accordance to the pioneering ILL scientific data policy – the first Scientific Data Policy to be published by an international science facility in November 2011.
A successful start
Across 2019-2020, ILL has already seen approximately 80% researchers accessing their data analysis through remote access, with hundreds of machines being used every day via the VISA platform.
“I have now participated on three remote experiments (with D7, D2B and D33) and VISA has worked extremely well for us, and the guidance that you provided was very clear and helpful. I imagine that getting everything up and running was a challenging project, and I wanted to thank you and your team for your efforts.”
"Yesterday, I presented visa.ill.fr to my users in order to show them how to work with Lamp and Nomad. They were literally enthusiastic about the tool. We used the sharing of instances feature with three people fiddling around in the same session, and my users were just “wow”, exactly the thing they were always looking for, they consider this an extremely useful helpful tool."
Driving the capabilities
While the use of the platform is still growing within the staff and international user community, the team are already developing upgrades for system that create a better user experience and more seamless communication across teams. The team has already successfully integrated a dual screen mode (ideal for the many programmes involved in instrument control) and JupyterLab – a frequently used tool for data analysis – for the ILL reactor cycle starting in January 2021.
The computing capacity at ILL, available through the platform, is constantly improving, and access to programmes for data analysis are kept up to date. Users are encouraged to contact the team to share feedback and suggestions for expanding the capabilities.
How do I use it?
Creating an instance on the VISA platform is simple, and accompanied by a step-by-step guide. Staff and users of ILL should find it easy to find an experiment, carry out the authorised activity or analysis, and collaborate on results.
What’s next?
In the coming months and years as we adapt to new working practices and modes of conducting science, VISA will play an essential role in the continued analysis of in-situ and in-operando industrial processes critical to accelerating innovations to help tackle current global challenges and more.
The upgrade from the existing chat-box to a video chat feature for both staff and scientific visitors is expected to be ready in 2021 – further bridging the gap between the in-person experimentation experience and remote access.
The natural progression of the platform following the perfection of these foundations will be support for remote sample management, further reducing the requirement for in-person operation of experiments. This will be particularly useful for high-throughput experiments, or those requiring many samples in high frequency. Already the remote access capabilities provide opportunities for the instrument scientists to carry out high-throughput samples in the most efficient manner.
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