Enabling quantitative data analysis through e-infrastructures

This paper discusses how quantitative data analysis in the social sciences can engage with and exploit an e-Infrastructure. We highlight how a number of activities which are central to quantitative data analysis, referred to as ‘data management’, can benefit from e-infrastructure support. We conclude by discussing how these issues are relevant to the DAMES (Data Management through e-Social Science) research Node, an ongoing project that aims to develop e-Infrastructural resources for quantitative data analysis in the social sciences

Experiences in teaching grid computing to advanced level students

The development of teaching materials for future software engineers is critical to the long term success of the grid. At present however there is considerable turmoil in the grid community both within the standards and the technology base underpinning these standards. In this context, it is especially challenging to develop teaching materials that have some sort of lifetime beyond the next wave of grid middleware and standards. In addition, the current way in which grid security is supported and delivered has two key problems. Firstly in the case of the UK e-Science community, scalability issues arise from a central certificate authority. Secondly, the current security mechanisms used by the grid community are not line grained enough. In this paper we outline how these issues are being addressed through the development of a grid computing module supported by an advanced authorisation infrastructure at the University of Glasgow

Advanced security infrastructures for grid education

This paper describes the research conducted into advanced authorization infrastructures at the National e-Science Centre (NeSC) at the University of Glasgow and their application to support a teaching environment as part of the Dynamic Virtual Organisations in e-Science Education (DyVOSE) project. We outline the lessons learnt in teaching Grid computing and rolling out the associated security authorisation infrastructures, and describe our plans for a future, extended security infrastructure for dynamic establishment of inter-institutional virtual organisations (VO) in the education domain

Model Based Development of Quality-Aware Software Services

Modelling languages and development frameworks give support for functional and structural description of software architectures. But quality-aware applications require languages which allow expressing QoS as a first-class concept during architecture design and service composition, and to extend existing tools and infrastructures adding support for modelling, evaluating, managing and monitoring QoS aspects. In addition to its functional behaviour and internal structure, the developer of each service must consider the fulfilment of its quality requirements. If the service is flexible, the output quality depends both on input quality and available resources (e.g., amounts of CPU execution time and memory). From the software engineering point of view, modelling of quality-aware requirements and architectures require modelling support for the description of quality concepts, support for the analysis of quality properties (e.g. model checking and consistencies of quality constraints, assembly of quality), tool support for the transition from quality requirements to quality-aware architectures, and from quality-aware architecture to service run-time infrastructures. Quality management in run-time service infrastructures must give support for handling quality concepts dynamically. QoS-aware modeling frameworks and QoS-aware runtime management infrastructures require a common evolution to get their integration

Advanced security infrastructures for grid education

This paper describes the research conducted into advanced authorization infrastructures at the National e-Science Centre (NeSC) at the University of Glasgow and their application to support a teaching environment as part of the Dynamic Virtual Organisations in e-Science Education (DyVOSE) project. We outline the lessons learnt in teaching Grid computing and rolling out the associated security authorisation infrastructures, and describe our plans for a future, extended security infrastructure for dynamic establishment of inter-institutional virtual organisations (VO) in the education domain

High-Performance Cloud Computing: A View of Scientific Applications

Scientific computing often requires the availability of a massive number of computers for performing large scale experiments. Traditionally, these needs have been addressed by using high-performance computing solutions and installed facilities such as clusters and super computers, which are difficult to setup, maintain, and operate. Cloud computing provides scientists with a completely new model of utilizing the computing infrastructure. Compute resources, storage resources, as well as applications, can be dynamically provisioned (and integrated within the existing infrastructure) on a pay per use basis. These resources can be released when they are no more needed. Such services are often offered within the context of a Service Level Agreement (SLA), which ensure the desired Quality of Service (QoS). Aneka, an enterprise Cloud computing solution, harnesses the power of compute resources by relying on private and public Clouds and delivers to users the desired QoS. Its flexible and service based infrastructure supports multiple programming paradigms that make Aneka address a variety of different scenarios: from finance applications to computational science. As examples of scientific computing in the Cloud, we present a preliminary case study on using Aneka for the classification of gene expression data and the execution of fMRI brain imaging workflow.Comment: 13 pages, 9 figures, conference pape

E-infrastructures fostering multi-centre collaborative research into the intensive care management of patients with brain injury

Clinical research is becoming ever more collaborative with multi-centre trials now a common practice. With this in mind, never has it been more important to have secure access to data and, in so doing, tackle the challenges of inter-organisational data access and usage. This is especially the case for research conducted within the brain injury domain due to the complicated multi-trauma nature of the disease with its associated complex collation of time-series data of varying resolution and quality. It is now widely accepted that advances in treatment within this group of patients will only be delivered if the technical infrastructures underpinning the collection and validation of multi-centre research data for clinical trials is improved. In recognition of this need, IT-based multi-centre e-Infrastructures such as the Brain Monitoring with Information Technology group (BrainIT - www.brainit.org) and Cooperative Study on Brain Injury Depolarisations (COSBID - www.cosbid.de) have been formed. A serious impediment to the effective implementation of these networks is access to the know-how and experience needed to install, deploy and manage security-oriented middleware systems that provide secure access to distributed hospital based datasets and especially the linkage of these data sets across sites. The recently funded EU framework VII ICT project Advanced Arterial Hypotension Adverse Event prediction through a Novel Bayesian Neural Network (AVERT-IT) is focused upon tackling these challenges. This chapter describes the problems inherent to data collection within the brain injury medical domain, the current IT-based solutions designed to address these problems and how they perform in practice. We outline how the authors have collaborated towards developing Grid solutions to address the major technical issues. Towards this end we describe a prototype solution which ultimately formed the basis for the AVERT-IT project. We describe the design of the underlying Grid infrastructure for AVERT-IT and how it will be used to produce novel approaches to data collection, data validation and clinical trial design is also presented

Advanced Security Infrastructures for Grid Education

This paper describes the research conducted into advanced authorization infrastructures at the National e-Science Centre (NeSC) at the University of Glasgow and their application to support a teaching environment as part of the Dynamic Virtual Organisations in e-Science Education (DyVOSE) project. We outline the lessons learnt in teaching Grid computing and rolling out the associated security authorisation infrastructures, and describe our plans for a future, extended security infrastructure for dynamic establishment of inter-institutional virtual organisations (VO) in the education domain