The Digital Puglia Project: An Active Digital Library of Remote Sensing Data

The growing need of software infrastructure able to create, maintain and ease the evolution of scientific data, promotes the development of digital libraries in order to provide the user with fast and reliable access to data. In a world that is rapidly changing, the standard view of a digital library as a data repository specialized to a community of users and provided with some search tools is no longer tenable. To be effective, a digital library should be an active digital library, meaning that users can process available data not just to retrieve a particular piece of information, but to infer new knowledge about the data at hand. Digital Puglia is a new project, conceived to emphasize not only retrieval of data to the client's workstation, but also customized processing of the data. Such processing tasks may include data mining, filtering and knowledge discovery in huge databases, compute-intensive image processing (such as principal component analysis, supervised classification, or pattern matching) and on demand computing sessions. We describe the issues, the requirements and the underlying technologies of the Digital Puglia Project, whose final goal is to build a high performance distributed and active digital library of remote sensing data

Publishing H2O pluglets in UDDI registries

Interoperability and standards, such as Grid Services are a focus of current Grid research. The intent is to facilitate resource virtualization, and to accommodate the intrinsic heterogeneity of resources in distributed environments. It is important that new and emerging metacomputing frameworks conform to these standards, in order to ensure interoperability with other grid solutions. In particular, the H2O metacomputing system offers several benefits, including lightweight operation, user-configurability, and selectable security levels. Its applicability would be enhanced even further through support for grid services and OGSA compliance. Code deployed into the H2O execution containers is referred to as pluglets. These pluglets constitute the end points of services in H2O, services that are to be made known through publication in a registry. In this contribution, we discuss a system pluglet, referred to as OGSAPluglet, that scans H2O execution containers for available services and publishes them into one or more UDDI registries. We also discuss in detail the algorithms that manage the publication of the appropriate WSDL and GSDL documents for the registration process

Global Grids and Software Toolkits: A Study of Four Grid Middleware Technologies

Grid is an infrastructure that involves the integrated and collaborative use of computers, networks, databases and scientific instruments owned and managed by multiple organizations. Grid applications often involve large amounts of data and/or computing resources that require secure resource sharing across organizational boundaries. This makes Grid application management and deployment a complex undertaking. Grid middlewares provide users with seamless computing ability and uniform access to resources in the heterogeneous Grid environment. Several software toolkits and systems have been developed, most of which are results of academic research projects, all over the world. This chapter will focus on four of these middlewares--UNICORE, Globus, Legion and Gridbus. It also presents our implementation of a resource broker for UNICORE as this functionality was not supported in it. A comparison of these systems on the basis of the architecture, implementation model and several other features is included.Comment: 19 pages, 10 figure

A reconfigurable component-based problem solving environment

©2001 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.Problem solving environments are an attractive approach to the integration of calculation and management tools for various scientific and engineering applications. These applications often require high performance computing components in order to be computationally feasible. It is therefore a challenge to construct integration technology, suitable for problem solving environments, that allows both flexibility as well as the embedding of parallel and high performance computing systems. Our DISCWorld system is designed to meet these needs and provides a Java-based middleware to integrate component applications across wide-area networks. Key features of our design are the abilities to: access remotely stored data; compose complex processing requests either graphically or through a scripting language; execute components on heterogeneous and remote platforms; reconfigure task sub-graphs to run across multiple servers. Operators in task graphs can be slow (but portable) “pure Java” implementations or wrappers to fast (platform specific) supercomputer implementations.K. Hawick, H. James, P. Coddingto

A Study of Grid Applications: Scheduling Perspective

As the Grid evolves from a high performance cluster middleware to a multipurpose utility computing framework, a good understanding of Grid applications, their statistics and utilisation patterns is required. This study looks at job execution times and resource utilisations in a Grid environment, and their significance in cluster and network dimensioning, local level scheduling and resource management

Supporting simulation in industry through the application of grid computing

An increased need for collaborative research, together with continuing advances in communication technology and computer hardware, has facilitated the development of distributed systems that can provide users access to geographically dispersed computing resources that are administered in multiple computer domains. The term grid computing, or grids, is popularly used to refer to such distributed systems. Simulation is characterized by the need to run multiple sets of computationally intensive experiments. Large scale scientific simulations have traditionally been the primary benefactor of grid computing. The application of this technology to simulation in industry has, however, been negligible. This research investigates how grid technology can be effectively exploited by users to model simulations in industry. It introduces our desktop grid, WinGrid, and presents a case study conducted at a leading European investment bank. Results indicate that grid computing does indeed hold promise for simulation in industry

MAGDA: A Mobile Agent based Grid Architecture

Mobile agents mean both a technology and a programming paradigm. They allow for a flexible approach which can alleviate a number of issues present in distributed and Grid-based systems, by means of features such as migration, cloning, messaging and other provided mechanisms. In this paper we describe an architecture (MAGDA – Mobile Agent based Grid Architecture) we have designed and we are currently developing to support programming and execution of mobile agent based application upon Grid systems

DiPerF: an automated DIstributed PERformance testing Framework

We present DiPerF, a distributed performance testing framework, aimed at simplifying and automating service performance evaluation. DiPerF coordinates a pool of machines that test a target service, collects and aggregates performance metrics, and generates performance statistics. The aggregate data collected provide information on service throughput, on service "fairness" when serving multiple clients concurrently, and on the impact of network latency on service performance. Furthermore, using this data, it is possible to build predictive models that estimate a service performance given the service load. We have tested DiPerF on 100+ machines on two testbeds, Grid3 and PlanetLab, and explored the performance of job submission services (pre WS GRAM and WS GRAM) included with Globus Toolkit 3.2.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures, will appear in IEEE/ACM Grid2004, November 200