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Progress on the Collaboratory for Protein Crystallography at SSRL. Hsiu-Ju Chiu, Fred Bertsch, Thomas Eriksson, Timothy McPhillips, Michael Soltis, and Peter Kuhn, Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory, 2575 Sand Hill Road, Menlo Park, CA 94025.

The goal of the Collaboratory for Protein Crystallography at SSRL is to design and implement “virtual beam lines” within the framework of “center without walls”, which provides an environment in which researchers distributed anywhere in the world can access to national resources for their collaboration on structure molecular biology research. Under this framework, the local and remote users are both given abilities to take full advantage of the beam line resources including the beam line control hardware and software, detectors, computers, and all legacy crystallography programs. We hope this collaboratory environment will encourage the collaborations between scientists of multi-disciplines, and result in a wealth production of new scientific discoveries.

The current features of Collaboratory include the standard data collection interface, unification of user accounts and home directories across all beam lines, high performance network infrastructure, massive data system common to all beam lines. Remote access is currently provided via thin client technology that gives local and remote users identical computing environments. A diffraction image viewer accessible via a web browser allows users to monitor the diffraction images being collected at the real time without installing any special crystallographic graphical program. Live video is used within the Collaboratory for the remote crystal monitoring and beam line general instrumentation viewing to ensure safe remote operation of beam lines. The high volume, centralized archive system was under development to permanently store x-ray diffraction images and metadata associated. The archive system will be located at SDSC, which operates a High-Performance Storage System (HPSS) giving high-speed access to approximately 1 Petabyte of tape storage.

Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Basic Energy Sciences. The SSRL Structural Molecular Biology Program is funded by the National Institutes of Health, National Center for Research Resources (Biomedical Technology Program), by the Department of Energy, Office of Biological and Environmental Research and by the National Institutes of Health, National Institute of General Medical Sciences.