The Characterisation VL is an Australian nationally funded virtual laboratory focused on bringing together the national community around their research data and software. Principally this means imaging techniques including optical microscopes. CT, MRI, Cryo Electron microscopy and other non-traditional techniques. As it turns out Characterisation is very general, but does have two principal commonalities: - Data sets are getting larger every day (CryoEM ~2-5TB per dataset, LLSM ~1-10TB per dataset). They are becoming too large for the average workstation and difficult for enterprise IT providers within universities. - Many data processing tools take the form of desktop applications, requiring interactivity and input from domain experts. Rather than building a dedicated web interface to a single workflow, the CVL has chosen to provide access to a virtual laboratory with all of the techniques needed by the range of characterisation communities. In this demonstration we will show how easy access to virtual laboratories (science gateway) has impacted the Australian characterisation community as well as explaining the first and second generations of architecture, used and how it can be reused by other computing facilities to benefit their users.
