4CeeD framework wins Best Paper Award at the IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud, and

Researchers from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), partnering with the University of Illinois Coordinated Science Lab (CSL), the Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory (MRL), and the Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory (MNTL) win Best Paper for their work on “Real-Time Data Acquisition and Analysis Framework for Material-related Cyber-Physical Environments” at the 17th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Grid Computing.

The paper describes a data acquisition and analysis framework (called 4CeeD) for the materials-to-devices process that leverages the Clowder framework developed at NCSA. 4CeeD supports capturing, curating, correlating and coordinating materials-to-devices digital data in a real-time and secure manner before fully archiving and publishing the data. 4CeeD targets student data obtained from campus lab equipment, data that is typically thrown away, and aims to preserve it so that future researchers can benefit from these otherwise unknown experimental outcomes. Evaluation results reveal that the curation service will additionally reduce the time spent at digital microscopes by almost a third, and helps users avoid methods with limited data capacity and security concerns.

“The main challenge for many data producing environments is curation, and Clowder enables 4CeeD to be able to go into the data, annotate it with extracted metadata, and through that automatically index collections,” said Kenton McHenry, Deputy Director of Scientific Software & Applications at NCSA.

NCSA serves as both a campus and national center, or hub, for academic R&D activities, in particular where computation and software are involved. Frameworks such as Clowder, used here in the realm of material science data management, are built up over numerous projects.

“The core framework receives contributions from the different projects, which in turn are leveraged by all projects. This bootstraps many of the basic requirements for ramping up new data-centric cyberinfrastructure efforts,” says Senior Research Programmer, Luigi Marini, lead developer of the Clowder framework.

According to McHenry, Clowder acts as a collecting ground that can bridge disciplines ranging from materials science, to biology, geoscience, engineering, cultural heritage, etc.

A future component that will be developed for this framework is data transfer via cloudlet to help orchestrate data transfer from multiple parties and avoid traffic congestion. The 4CeeD team also plans to increase the number of instruments supported by the 4CeeD framework while expanding its user base.

Principal investigators (PI) and co-PIs for this paper were Klara Nahrstedt (CS and CSL), Paul Braun, (MRL), Brian Cunningham (MNTL – ECE/Bioengineering Departments), David Nicol (Information Trust Institute – ECE Department) and Narayan Aluru (Computer Science and Engineering – Mechanical Engineering Department).

Authors include Kenton McHenry (NCSA), Aaron Schwartz-Duval (Bioengineering), Phuong Nguyen (Computer Science), Klara Nahrstedt (CS and CSL), Steven Konstanty (CSL), Todd Nicholson (CSL), Normand Paquin (CSL), Roy Campbell (Computer Science), Indranil Gupta (Computer Science), Timothy Spila (MRL), Aaron Schwartz-Duval (MNTL), Thomas O’Brien (MNTL), and Michael Chan (Engineering).

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