The DORII project test bed: Distributed eScience applications at work

Much interest has arisen recently on the access to and management of remote instrumentation and laboratory equipment in general. The complexity of activities related to these topics can be summarized under the name of Remote Instrumentation Services, where the term “instrumentation” includes any kind of experimental equipment, and the term “services” underlines the general framework whereby the instrumental resources should be accessed (i.e., the Service Oriented Architecture). Building on the foundations of previous European projects, the aim of DORII (Deployment of Remote Instrumentation Infrastructure) is to build and operate a test bed addressing different areas of eScience. These include oceanographic applications, earthquake engineering, and large-scale physics experiments on synchrotron light. The paper describes the characteristics and the design of the test bed stemming from the applications' requirements, in terms of networking and middleware, and its current status of development.