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 Scientific Workflow System For Genomic Data Analysis

Scientific workflows have become increasingly popular as a new computing paradigm for scientists to design and execute complex and distributed scientific processes to enable and accelerate many scientific discoveries. Although several scientific workflow management systems (SWFMSs) have been developed, there is a great need for an integrated scientific workflow system that enables the design and execution of higher-level scientific workflows, which integrate heterogeneous scientific workflows enacted by existing SWFMSs. On one hand, science is becoming increasingly collaborative today, requiring an integrated solution that combines the features and capabilities of different SWFMSs, which are typically developed and optimized towards one single discipline. One the other hand, such an integrated environment can immediately leverage existing and emerging techniques and strengths of various SWFMSs and their supported execution environments, such as Cluster, Grid, and Cloud. The main contributions of this dissertation are: 1) We propose a scientific workflow system, called GENOMEFLOW, to design, develop, and execute higher-level scientific workflows, whose workflow tasks are themselves scientific workflows enacted by existing SWFMSs; 2) We propose a workflow scheduling algorithm, called GSA, to enable the parallel execution of such heterogeneous scientific workflows in their native heterogeneous environments; and 3) We implemented GENOMEFLOW towards the life science community and developed several GENOMEFLOW scientific workflows to demonstrate the capabilities of our system for genome data analysis applications

Integration, management and communication of heterogeneous design resources with WWW technologies

Recently, advanced information technologies have opened new pos-sibilities for collaborative designs. In this paper, a Web-based collaborative de-sign environment is proposed, where heterogeneous design applications can be integrated with a common interface, managed dynamically for publishing and searching, and communicated with each other for integrated multi-objective de-sign. The CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) is employed as an implementation tool to enable integration and communication of design application programs; and the XML (eXtensible Markup Language) is used as a common data descriptive language for data exchange between heterogeneous applications and for resource description and recording. This paper also intro-duces the implementation of the system and the encapsulating issues of existing legacy applications. At last, an example of gear design based on the system is il-lustrated to identify the methods and procedure developed by this research

An Architectural Framework for Collaboration of Heterogeneous Communication Devices Using WAP and Mobile Device Augmented(MDA)Gateway Integration

Within the last couple of years, the challenge of displaying collaborative multimedia information has become very important with the large diversity of communication devices such as Personal Computers, laptops, notebooks and handheld devices. The shared data and information may be presented with different views depending on the communication device used by a particular collaborator. The use of various web tools (HTML, WML etc) offers some solutions to the problem but if the target application requires more complex features such as rich multimedia data than is manageable using HTML or WML format, something else need to be done. In this paper, we propose a framework that integrates WAP and MDA Gateway to support collaboration among virtual teams and nomadic workers using heterogeneous communication devices. We then discuss an approach for augmenting mobile device small screen capabilities with surrounding large screen display device

Towards a generic platform for developing CSCL applications using Grid infrastructure

The goal of this paper is to explore the possibility of using CSCL component-based software under a Grid infrastructure. The merge of these technologies represents an attractive, but probably quite laborious enterprise if we consider not only the benefits but also the barriers that we have to overcome. This work presents an attempt toward this direction by developing a generic platform of CSCL components and discussing the advantages that we could obtain if we adapted it to the Grid. We then propose a means that could make this adjustment possible due to the high degree of genericity that our library component is endowed with by being based on the generic programming paradigm. Finally, an application of our library is proposed both for validating the adequacy of the platform which it is based on and for indicating the possibilities gained by using it under the Grid.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version