cloudEMAPS is a cloud- and web-based microscopy simulation tool jointly designed and developed by researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and those from EMLab Solutions, Inc. in Champaign, IL, USA. The goal of the project is to provide easy access to students and to encourage their involvement in microscopy learning and research. This tool is now available through web-browser for its basic features. These features include interactive kinematic and Bloch wave diffraction simulations. It is our vision that it not only serve as an effective platform for learning fundamental science of microscopy and crystallography, and but also as an efficient dissemination vehicle for information regarding exciting innovations and advances in microscopy and in scientific computing in general.
Compared to the popular and now decommissioned webEMAPS at University if Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and many similar commercial and free tools, cloudEMAPS is superior with the latest cloud and web technologies, offering greatly improved performance, scallability and security for the users. Beside its back-end with powerful cloud computing doing the heavy lifting in core diffraction calculation and image processing, cloudEMAPS client side user interface through popular browsers makes simulations visualization instantaneous and extremely easy to access and interactive. In addition to its public availability, it also provides flexibility in its solutions according to users privacy and security requirements through private cloud and local installations where users can run the tool with absolute security assurance within their own network firewall or even on their own machines.
In this poster, we will present the design ideas for cloudEMAPS and its diffraction simulation features we built using AWS cloud services and RESTful web programming frameworks. We will also demonstrate the basic workflow and benefits of using the simulation tool in classroom learning and training in research lab and industry programs and provide an overview of future work we plan to take advantage of the power of cloud computing and ubiquitous internet application in scientific computing such as electron microscopy and crystallography.