Jini Technology Applied to Railway Systems

In the world of pervasive computing where large management systems, as well as small devices, all become interconnected, the problem of the configuration and management of networks is becoming increasingly complex. System administrators have to deal with many problems due to the increasingly distributed architecture of systems. Jini, a new paradigm for the development and management of distributed systems, provides mechanisms that enable systems to plug together to form an impromptu community. This practice report demonstrates how Jini can be applied in an industrial environment, or more exactly how it can be used in the integration of embedded devices on-board trains in the back-office IT infrastructure of railway operators. We present two use cases: the first is about an on-board service that allows for remote access to an on-board diagnosis databas

Querying Large Physics Data Sets Over an Information Grid

Optimising use of the Web (WWW) for LHC data analysis is a complex problem and illustrates the challenges arising from the integration of and computation across massive amounts of information distributed worldwide. Finding the right piece of information can, at times, be extremely time-consuming, if not impossible. So-called Grids have been proposed to facilitate LHC computing and many groups have embarked on studies of data replication, data migration and networking philosophies. Other aspects such as the role of 'middleware' for Grids are emerging as requiring research. This paper positions the need for appropriate middleware that enables users to resolve physics queries across massive data sets. It identifies the role of meta-data for query resolution and the importance of Information Grids for high-energy physics analysis rather than just Computational or Data Grids. This paper identifies software that is being implemented at CERN to enable the querying of very large collaborating HEP data-sets, initially being employed for the construction of CMS detectors.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure