The DoE 2000 Materials MicroCharacterization Collaboratory is pleased to announce the receipt of a research support grant of approximately $270K in hardware and software from Sun Microsystems Computer Company and Graham Technology Solutions .

The grant from Sun Microsystems and Graham Technology, will be providing each of the principle members of the Collaboratory (ANL, LBNL, NIST, ORNL, and Univ. of Illinois) with state-of-the-art SUN Sparc Ultra II-1300 Workstations and associated peripheral equipment (Video Cameras, Tape Drives, Digitizers...). This hardware together with a complete software development environment (C, Java, and Secure WWW Server) and the state-of-the-art software from Graham Technology, will be used to to establish base-line systems for servers in the collaboratory. These systems will act as intelligent agents and facilitate the operation of Electron Microscopy and Microanalysis Instruments currently on-line within the MMC, as well as provide the testbeds for incorporation of future instrumentation (X-ray and Neutron Beam Lines) in the MMC. With the installation of this hardware and software the ability of remote users to access the unique DoE User Facilities at University and Government Laboratories for Materials Science research will be substantially enhanced at all levels of operation. In addition, this grant will afford the MMC members the opportunity to continue development of platform independent access to the unique Materials Science Experimental Research Facilities in the MMC.

The Materials MicroCharacterization Collaboratory is a pilot project established in March of 1997, and is co-funded through the following participating research institutions:

• Argonne National Laboratory / University of Chicago,
• Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory / University of California,
• Oak Ridge National Laboratory / Lockheed Martin Energy Research Corp.,
• National Institute of Standards and Technology,
• University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana,

The Department of Energy:

Office of Basic Energy Science
      Divisions of Materials Science (DoE/OER/BES/DMS),

Office of Transporation Technology
      Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Program (DoE/OTT/EREN),

Office of Computational and Technology Research
      Division of Mathematical Informational and Computational Sciences (DoE/OCTR/MICS) ,

The Department of Commerce:

National Institute of Standards and Technology
      National Advanced Manufacturing TestBed Program (DoC/NIST/NAMT),

• Gatan Inc.
• R. J. Lee Group.
• EMiSPEC Systems Inc.
• Philips Electronic Instruments
• Hitachi Instruments, Inc.
• Japan Electron Optics Laboratories-USA
• SUN MicroSystems
• Graham Technology Solutions.

In this project we will be joining the participating institutions into a single on-line interactive virtual laboratory. The thrust of this virtual laboratory is to provide real time access to on-line expertise and state-of-the-art instrumentation for materials science research enabling microcharacterization of materials on scales ranging from millimeters (10**-3 meters) to nanometers (10**-9 meters). The project encompasses a wide range of information resources, protocols and tasks including: high speed, high resolution images transfer, electronic notebooks, large numerical data sets, video conferencing, and interactive remote control protocols for multi-million dollar research instrumentation.