A project that impacts material science, device fabrication, and other materials design and manufacturing processes through open-source software licenses and training programs.
Topics
Description
The Timely and Trustworthy Curating and Coordinating Data Framework (T2C2) project aims to dramatically reduce the materials-to-device process, which can currently span 20 years. Through the DIBBs program, funded by the National Science Foundation CISE Directorate and their Advanced Cyber-Infrastructure Division (ACI), T2C2 will develop a new framework and system that focuses on the potential of capturing, curating, correlating and coordinating materials-to-devices digital data in a real-time and trusted manner before fully archiving and publishing the data for wide access and sharing. The software developed in this project is useful throughout the materials science and device fabrication fields, by automatically collecting, archiving, and providing collected information on all phases of materials and device fabrication development.
Introduction to 4CeeD
The project develops the Timely and Trusted Curation and Coordination (T2C2) Data Framework, consisting of two data blocks:
1)The 4CeeD Curator, providing real-time acquisition and curation of digital data from selected materials-making / characterization and device-fabrication instruments in the collaborative research units at the university, the Material Research Lab (MRL) and the Micro-and-Nanotechnology Lab (MNTL) , and
2) The 4CeeD Coordinator, where collected data are filtered, correlations among data and dependency relations are identified, and the results are connected to other data processing capabilities. The goal of the T2C2 framework is to enable reduction of the development time and cost of materials-making /characterization to device-making processes.
Through open-source software licenses and training programs, the project impacts material science, device fabrication and other fields within the university, and other interdisciplinary research institutions and their materials design and manufacturing processes. Through courses, tutorials, workshops, and outreach, the project develops interdisciplinary scientists, teaches the next generation of students, and informs broader audiences about the potential of timely and trusted data collection, curation, spatio-temporal analytics, and correlations between material-making/characterization and device-fabrication processes.
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More Info
BRACELET: Robust Cloudlet Infrastructure for Scientific Instruments’ Lifetime Connectivity http://t2c2.csl.illinois.edu/bracelet/
The 4CeeD tool can only function when the instrument’s operating system (OS) is Windows 7 or higher, allowing instruments to have the computational capability and network speed to be part of a distributed cloud platform, and to have all the necessary security patches to be connected to the campus network. However, more than half of the major scientific instruments on our campus and their software tools run Windows XP, Windows NT, Windows 2000, and Windows 3.11, and thus are set offline because they cannot operate at the network speed of a powerful cloud and are not patched with the latest security patches.
Our goal is to deploy a new infrastructure on our campus across different research laboratories that run scientific instruments with the problems described above, and develop a robust cloudlet-based infrastructure, called BRACELET, at the network edges. A cloudlet is a networked edge device and a surrogate to the real cloud, placed between the scientific instruments and cloud as the middle tier of a three-tier hierarchy: the scientific instrument, cloudlet, and cloud. As shown in Figure 1, the cloudlet will be placed within the campus building to shape and protect traffic from instruments in the campus building (e.g., MRL) to the campus node hosting the research cloud cluster. The cloudlet will play a foundational role in keeping the instrument connected throughout its lifetime (10–15 years), continuously providing the otherwise missing performance and security features for the instrument as its OS ages. Hence, BRACELET will represent an integrated three-tier infrastructure that will integrate and innovate the existing campus network, cloud, and security infrastructure with the 4CeeD data upload service and its robust cloudlet infrastructure.