Indiana University agreed to support in the SCrAPS initiative by assisting with the transmission and storage of data as it is being collected. Crystallographers from the Indiana University Molecular Structure Center (IUMSC) are engaged in several related collaborations with colleagues from the Computer Science Department, the Office of the Vice President for Information Technology, and the School of Informatics at Indiana University. The subject of these collaborations is the transmission, storage, and analysis of large scientific data sets.

CIMA is used for acquiring data and monitor X-ray crystallography instruments in home laboratories and at synchrotron sources. The software architecture is shown in the figure below. There are four main components:

• The Instrument Representative that implements the CIMA interface between the diffractometer CCD detector and several sensors related to it. CIMA has plugin's for various sensor readings including the EPICS/EZCA system used at APS to acquire a range of experimental data from EPICS/EZCA.
• MyManager, a data manager that provides location-independent storage of CCD frames and sensor data from the detector. The MyManager component is responsible for receiving data from the remote laboratory, sorting the data into categories (e.g., temperature, operational parameters, and CCD frames from the detector) and storing the data and metadata associated with each reading into a data base. The actual CCD raw data are initially stored on massive storage disks provided by the Indiana University Data Capacitor Project. Once the researchers have worked up the raw data and no longer need immediate access to it, they get migrated to the Indiana University High Performance Storage System (HPSS).
• A Web Service, the Data Manager Web Service (DM-WS) through which applications can access data acquired from Mymanager.
• A portal and set of application-specific portlets that use the DM-WS to find and present data to the end user. The portal also provides various administrative tasks related to assigning the sample access and ownership. One portal can display data from several laboratories. Our current CIMA Crystallography Portal is http://156.56.94.166:8080/gridsphere.

For more information about the CIMA Crystallography Application see:
http://www.instrumentmiddleware.org:8080/cima/test/x-ray-crystallography
This work is supported by the National Science Foundation, Program: NSF Middleware Initiative, Cooperative Agreement No, 0330568.