NOBUGS 2008

The seventh NOBUGS conference will be held November 3-5, 2008 in Sydney, Australia at the Rydges Cronulla Beach Hotel near the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) facility.

The aim of the NOBUGS series of conferences is to foster collaboration for developers of computer techniques in scientific instrumentation, especially as employed at large scale user facilities. The conference seeks to improve the user's scientific productivity by focusing on the interaction between the experimenter and the facilities' infrastructures, apparatus, and data.

NOBUGS 2008 will feature four themes: collaborative software development, data management, data acquisition, and grid portals for users. There is considerable overlap in these themes due to their mixture of process, product, frontend, and backend components. To increase the intensity of interactions for attendees, four chairs will be appointed to champion one of the themes and to select and publish via the NOBUGS website topical information and comments intended to initiate discussion that will precede the conference. Subsequently the presentations and workshop sessions at the conference will advance the process, hopefully leading to some substantive collaboration or product.

The conference topics include, but are not limited to:

• Collaborative software development. Chair, Brent Fultz, Cal Tech
  • Collaborative Initiatives
  • Programming Techniques
  • Instrument Simulation and Virtual Instruments

• Data management. Chair, Robert McGreevy, ISIS
  • Data Formats
  • Data Analysis
  • Distributed Computing
  • Scientific Databases
  • User Facility Management

• Integrated acquisition and analysis. Chair, Mark Koennecke, PSI
  • Data Acquisition and Instrument Control
  • Automated Instrument Calibration
  • Automated Experiments and Data Collection
  • Remote Control and Monitoring of Data Acquisition and Data Analysis Tasks

• Grid portals. Chair, Steve Miller, SNS
  • Graphical User Interfaces
  • WWW Application Development
  • Data Analysis
  • Remote Control of Data Acquisition and Data Analysis Tasks
  • Distributed Computing
  • Facility Security

A tour of ANSTO will be provided during the course of the conference. There will be a workshop dinner on Tuesday.

To read more on the conference, please visit the NOBUGS 2008 website