Gridlab - a grid application toolkid and testbed

In this paper we present the new project called GridLab which is funded by the European Commission under the Fifth Framework Programme. The GridLab project, made up of computer scientists, astrophysicists and other scientists from various application areas, will develop and implement the grid application toolkit (GAT) together with a set of services to enable easy and efficient use of Grid resources in a real and production grid environment. GAT will provide core, easy to use functionality through a carefully constructed set of generic higher level grid APIs through which an application will be able to call the grid services laying beneath in order to perform efficiently in the Grid environment using various, dramatically wild application scenarios

Grid Information Technology as a New Technological Tool for e-Science, Healthcare and Life Science

Nowadays, scientific projects require collaborative environments and powerful computing resources capable of handling huge quantities of data, which gives rise to e-Science. These requirements are evident in the need to optimise time and efforts in activities to do with health. When e-Science focuses on the collaborative handling of all the information generated in clinical medicine and health, e-Health is the result. Scientists are taking increasing interest in an emerging technology – Grid Information Technology – that may offer a solution to their current needs. The current work aims to survey how e-Science is using this technology all around the world. We also argue that the technology may provide an ideal solution for the new challenges facing e-Health and Life Science.Hoy en día, los proyectos científicos requieren poderosos recursos de computación capaces de manejar grandes cantidades de datos, los cuales han dado paso a la ciencia electrónica (e-ciencia). Estos requerimientos se hacen evidentes en la necesidad de optimizar tiempo y esfuerzos en actividades relacionadas con la salud. Cuando la e-ciencia se enfoca en el manejo colaborativo de toda la información generada en la medicina clínica y la salud, da como resultado la salud electrónica (e-salud). Los científicos se han interesado cada vez más y más en una tecnología emergente, como lo es la Tecnología de información en red, la que puede ofrecer solución a sus necesidades cotidianas. El siguiente trabajo apunta a examinar como la e-ciencia es empleada en el mundo. También se discute que la tecnología puede proveer una solución ideal para encarar nuevos desafíos en e-salud y Ciencias de la Vida.Nowadays, scientific projects require collaborative environments and powerful computing resources capable of handling huge quantities of data, which gives rise to e-Science. These requirements are evident in the need to optimise time and efforts in activities to do with health. When e-Science focuses on the collaborative handling of all the information generated in clinical medicine and health, e-Health is the result. Scientists are taking increasing interest in an emerging technology – Grid Information Technology – that may offer a solution to their current needs. The current work aims to survey how e-Science is using this technology all around the world. We also argue that the technology may provide an ideal solution for the new challenges facing e-Health and Life Science

Exploiting relocation to reduce network dimensions of resilient optical grids

Optical grids are widely deployed to solve complex problems we are facing today. An important aspect of the supporting network is resiliency i.e. the ability to overcome network failures. In contrast to classical network protection schemes, we will not necessarily provide a back-up path between the source and the original destination. Instead, we will try to relocate the job to another server location if this means that we can provide a backup path which comprises less wavelengths than the one the traditional scheme would suggest. This relocation can be backed up by the grid specific anycast principle: a user generally does not care where his job is executed and is only interested in its results. We present ILP formulations for both resilience schemes and we evaluate them in a case study on an European network topology

Investigating grid computing technologies for use with commercial simulation packages

As simulation experimentation in industry become more computationally demanding, grid computing can be seen as a promising technology that has the potential to bind together the computational resources needed to quickly execute such simulations. To investigate how this might be possible, this paper reviews the grid technologies that can be used together with commercial-off-the-shelf simulation packages (CSPs) used in industry. The paper identifies two specific forms of grid computing (Public Resource Computing and Enterprise-wide Desktop Grid Computing) and the middleware associated with them (BOINC and Condor) as being suitable for grid-enabling existing CSPs. It further proposes three different CSP-grid integration approaches and identifies one of them to be the most appropriate. It is hoped that this research will encourage simulation practitioners to consider grid computing as a technologically viable means of executing CSP-based experiments faster

Deploying Web-based Visual Exploration Tools on the Grid

We discuss a web-based portal for the exploration, encapsulation, and dissemination of visualization results over the Grid. This portal integrates three components: an interface client for structured visualization exploration, a visualization web application to manage the generation and capture of the visualization results, and a centralized portal application server to access and manage grid resources. Our approach uses standard web technologies to make the system accessible with minimal user setup. We demonstrate the usefulness of the developed system using an example for Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) data visualization

A National Collaboratory to Advance the Science of High Temperature Plasma Physics for Magnetic Fusion

This report summarizes the work of the National Fusion Collaboratory (NFC) Project to develop a persistent infrastructure to enable scientific collaboration for magnetic fusion research. The original objective of the NFC project was to develop and deploy a national FES Grid (FusionGrid) that would be a system for secure sharing of computation, visualization, and data resources over the Internet. The goal of FusionGrid was to allow scientists at remote sites to participate as fully in experiments and computational activities as if they were working on site thereby creating a unified virtual organization of the geographically dispersed U.S. fusion community. The vision for FusionGrid was that experimental and simulation data, computer codes, analysis routines, visualization tools, and remote collaboration tools are to be thought of as network services. In this model, an application service provider (ASP provides and maintains software resources as well as the necessary hardware resources. The project would create a robust, user-friendly collaborative software environment and make it available to the US FES community. This Grid's resources would be protected by a shared security infrastructure including strong authentication to identify users and authorization to allow stakeholders to control their own resources. In this environment, access to services is stressed rather than data or software portability

A Study of the Relationship of Communication Technology Configurations in Virtual Research Environments and Effectiveness of Collaborative Research

Virtual Research Environments (VRE) are electronic meeting places for interaction among scientists created by combining software tools and computer networking. Virtual teams are enjoying increased importance in the conduct of scientific research because of the rising cost of traditional scientific scholarly communication, the growing importance of shared academic research by geographically dispersed scientific teams, and changes in the corporate research structures. New facilities provided by the Internet technology enhanced this situation. Currently, our knowledge about VRE-based scientific communication and what makes it effective is relatively immature in terms of understanding technology (interface, architecture, and software evaluation), system management (software systems, visualization, scalability), knowledge bases, expert systems, and coordination. Moreover, we do not have a comprehensive classification scheme for virtual research environments primarily from a technological viewpoint. This study provided an analysis of VRE from a technological standpoint and developed a conceptual model that identified factors facilitating collaboration effectiveness with a primary focus on technology. VRE portals were at the core of the investigation as they are the entry points for VRE related information and resource access. First, the study developed a methodological framework for characterizing VREs, applied that framework to examine and classify existing VRE systems, and developed a new classification. Then, the study established a relationship between the technological profiles of various types of VREs and their productivity. Study results show that the technological arrangements of the VRE neither depend upon scientific discipline nor the existing functional typology. The study did not identify a significant presence of communication and collaboration technologies within the VRE systems. However, results indicated that there were a correlation between communication and collaboration technologies and VRE effectiveness

Washington University Record, October 14, 1999

https://digitalcommons.wustl.edu/record/1841/thumbnail.jp