MSUO Information Technology and Geographical Information Systems: Common Protocols & Procedures. Report to the Marine Safety Umbrella Operation

The Marine Safety Umbrella Operation (MSUO) facilitates the cooperation between Interreg funded Marine Safety Projects and maritime stakeholders. The main aim of MSUO is to permit efficient operation of new projects through Project Cooperation Initiatives, these include the review of the common protocols and procedures for Information Technology (IT) and Geographical Information Systems (GIS). This study carried out by CSA Group and the National Centre for Geocomputation (NCG) reviews current spatial information standards in Europe and the data management methodologies associated with different marine safety projects. International best practice was reviewed based on the combined experience of spatial data research at NCG and initiatives in the US, Canada and the UK relating to marine security service information and acquisition and integration of large marine datasets for ocean management purposes. This report identifies the most appropriate international data management practices that could be adopted for future MSUO projects

ElasTraS: An Elastic Transactional Data Store in the Cloud

Over the last couple of years, "Cloud Computing" or "Elastic Computing" has emerged as a compelling and successful paradigm for internet scale computing. One of the major contributing factors to this success is the elasticity of resources. In spite of the elasticity provided by the infrastructure and the scalable design of the applications, the elephant (or the underlying database), which drives most of these web-based applications, is not very elastic and scalable, and hence limits scalability. In this paper, we propose ElasTraS which addresses this issue of scalability and elasticity of the data store in a cloud computing environment to leverage from the elastic nature of the underlying infrastructure, while providing scalable transactional data access. This paper aims at providing the design of a system in progress, highlighting the major design choices, analyzing the different guarantees provided by the system, and identifying several important challenges for the research community striving for computing in the cloud.Comment: 5 Pages, In Proc. of USENIX HotCloud 200

Mass Storage Management and the Grid

The University of Edinburgh has a significant interest in mass storage systems as it is one of the core groups tasked with the roll out of storage software for the UK's particle physics grid, GridPP. We present the results of a development project to provide software interfaces between the SDSC Storage Resource Broker, the EU DataGrid and the Storage Resource Manager. This project was undertaken in association with the eDikt group at the National eScience Centre, the Universities of Bristol and Glasgow, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and the San Diego Supercomputing Center.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, Presented at Computing for High Energy and Nuclear Physics 2004 (CHEP '04), Interlaken, Switzerland, September 200