Success stories
Computational Particle Physics
The original use case that has driven the development of DiGS is from Computational Particle Physics. Since 2002, the DiGS team have been working with the UK computational particle physics (CPP) community to develop the current version of the application.
Alongside the development of the software, the DiGS team has worked with CPP to develop international agreed standards for the acquisition, curation, and analysis of the raw data. The result of this effort is the DiGS-powered, UKQCD Data Grid which:
- provides ~100 Terabytes of storage space,
- spanning 8 institutions in the UK and USA, and
- hosting around 60,000 datasets.
More information [http://www.gridpp.ac.uk/qcdgrid/]
Cell Biology
With support from the STFC PIPSS programme and the eDIKT programme, the EPCC team has also initiated a collaboration with the Cell Biology community. The collaboration has deployed a pilot, DiGS-powered system across two UK sites at the University of Oxford and the University of Edinburgh. The pilot system is intended to support an investigation into the method of transport and anchoring of mRNA in a genus of fly called Drosophila by the research group of Ilan Davis. The group rely on data from a specialised microscope, installed at the University of Oxford, that has been adapted to allow the injection of fluorescently labelled RNAs into Drosophila oocytes and embryos. The images acquired from the microscope in Oxford need to be made available for processing and analysis by a team at the University of Edinburgh.
The implementation is motivated by the more general need for distributed data management in the community. For example, the Davis group also has collaborators in the Netherlands, sharing both light microscope and electron microscope images.
Building on experience gained through work with CPP, the team are also aiming to employ standards for the annotation of microscope image data that are being developed within the Open Microscope Environment (OME).
More information [http://dg4cb.forge.nesc.ac.uk/]
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