Overview¶
VISA (Virtual Infrastructure for Scientific Analysis) is a platform that makes it simple to create compute instances on an OpenStack infrastructure to enable scientific users to analyse their experimental data remotely using just a web browser.
The development of VISA came around from serveral key issues. Firstly, with scientific data volume increasing over the years, it is becoming ever more harder to transfer data from it’s point of acquisition to an experimenter’s home facility. There is also a need to harmonise the computing architectures/environments to ensure that a common data analysis platform is available for scientific collaborations. As well as data analysis needs, with the increased use of remote experimentation (since the Covid-19 pandemic), a secure platform to perform instrument control remotely is essential.
Initialy developped at the Institut Laue-Langevin (ILL) in Grenoble, France VISA aimed to provide a solution to this and offer Data Analysis as a Service in the cloud. The aim originally was to simplify access for scientists to data analysis tools and offser remote support to users from experts at the ILL. With Covid-19, the scope of the project was increaed to allow scientists to remotely control their experiments with the assistance of on-site instrument scientists.
VISA has been fully developped in the context of PaNOSC (Photon an Neutron Open Science Cloud) meaning that this functionality is provided in a pan-European way to all scientists. The aim is to allow institutes to adapt VISA to their infrastructure and provide a bells and whistles solution to data analysis for scientists so that they get direct access to their experimental data, the tools needed to analysis it and enable real-time collaborations. With VISA, the PaN institutes are working together to answer a real need in the community.