24,366 research outputs found
DIAMOnDS - DIstributed Agents for MObile & Dynamic Services
Distributed Services Architecture with support for mobile agents between
services, offer significantly improved communication and computational
flexibility. The uses of agents allow execution of complex operations that
involve large amounts of data to be processed effectively using distributed
resources. The prototype system Distributed Agents for Mobile and Dynamic
Services (DIAMOnDS), allows a service to send agents on its behalf, to other
services, to perform data manipulation and processing. Agents have been
implemented as mobile services that are discovered using the Jini Lookup
mechanism and used by other services for task management and communication.
Agents provide proxies for interaction with other services as well as specific
GUI to monitor and control the agent activity. Thus agents acting on behalf of
one service cooperate with other services to carry out a job, providing
inter-operation of loosely coupled services in a semi-autonomous way. Remote
file system access functionality has been incorporated by the agent framework
and allows services to dynamically share and browse the file system resources
of hosts, running the services. Generic database access functionality has been
implemented in the mobile agent framework that allows performing complex data
mining and processing operations efficiently in distributed system. A basic
data searching agent is also implemented that performs a query based search in
a file system. The testing of the framework was carried out on WAN by moving
Connectivity Test agents between AgentStations in CERN, Switzerland and NUST,
Pakistan.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, CHEP03, La Jolla, California, March 24-28, 200
Heterogeneous biomedical database integration using a hybrid strategy: a p53 cancer research database.
Complex problems in life science research give rise to multidisciplinary collaboration, and hence, to the need for heterogeneous database integration. The tumor suppressor p53 is mutated in close to 50% of human cancers, and a small drug-like molecule with the ability to restore native function to cancerous p53 mutants is a long-held medical goal of cancer treatment. The Cancer Research DataBase (CRDB) was designed in support of a project to find such small molecules. As a cancer informatics project, the CRDB involved small molecule data, computational docking results, functional assays, and protein structure data. As an example of the hybrid strategy for data integration, it combined the mediation and data warehousing approaches. This paper uses the CRDB to illustrate the hybrid strategy as a viable approach to heterogeneous data integration in biomedicine, and provides a design method for those considering similar systems. More efficient data sharing implies increased productivity, and, hopefully, improved chances of success in cancer research. (Code and database schemas are freely downloadable, http://www.igb.uci.edu/research/research.html.)
Enabling Adaptive Grid Scheduling and Resource Management
Wider adoption of the Grid concept has led to an increasing amount of federated
computational, storage and visualisation resources being available to scientists and
researchers. Distributed and heterogeneous nature of these resources renders most of the
legacy cluster monitoring and management approaches inappropriate, and poses new
challenges in workflow scheduling on such systems. Effective resource utilisation monitoring
and highly granular yet adaptive measurements are prerequisites for a more efficient Grid
scheduler. We present a suite of measurement applications able to monitor per-process
resource utilisation, and a customisable tool for emulating observed utilisation models. We
also outline our future work on a predictive and probabilistic Grid scheduler. The research is
undertaken as part of UK e-Science EPSRC sponsored project SO-GRM (Self-Organising
Grid Resource Management) in cooperation with BT
Development of grid frameworks for clinical trials and epidemiological studies
E-Health initiatives such as electronic clinical trials and epidemiological studies require access to and usage of a range of both clinical and other data sets. Such data sets are typically only available over many heterogeneous domains where a plethora of often legacy based or in-house/bespoke IT solutions exist. Considerable efforts and investments are being made across the UK to upgrade the IT infrastructures across the National Health Service (NHS) such as the National Program for IT in the NHS (NPFIT) [1]. However, it is the case that currently independent and largely non-interoperable IT solutions exist across hospitals, trusts, disease registries and GP practices – this includes security as well as more general compute and data infrastructures. Grid technology allows issues of distribution and heterogeneity to be overcome, however the clinical trials domain places special demands on security and data which hitherto the Grid community have not satisfactorily addressed. These challenges are often common across many studies and trials hence the development of a re-usable framework for creation and subsequent management of such infrastructures is highly desirable. In this paper we present the challenges in developing such a framework and outline initial scenarios and prototypes developed within the MRC funded Virtual Organisations for Trials and Epidemiological Studies (VOTES) project [2]
Advanced Cyberinfrastructure for Science, Engineering, and Public Policy
Progress in many domains increasingly benefits from our ability to view the
systems through a computational lens, i.e., using computational abstractions of
the domains; and our ability to acquire, share, integrate, and analyze
disparate types of data. These advances would not be possible without the
advanced data and computational cyberinfrastructure and tools for data capture,
integration, analysis, modeling, and simulation. However, despite, and perhaps
because of, advances in "big data" technologies for data acquisition,
management and analytics, the other largely manual, and labor-intensive aspects
of the decision making process, e.g., formulating questions, designing studies,
organizing, curating, connecting, correlating and integrating crossdomain data,
drawing inferences and interpreting results, have become the rate-limiting
steps to progress. Advancing the capability and capacity for evidence-based
improvements in science, engineering, and public policy requires support for
(1) computational abstractions of the relevant domains coupled with
computational methods and tools for their analysis, synthesis, simulation,
visualization, sharing, and integration; (2) cognitive tools that leverage and
extend the reach of human intellect, and partner with humans on all aspects of
the activity; (3) nimble and trustworthy data cyber-infrastructures that
connect, manage a variety of instruments, multiple interrelated data types and
associated metadata, data representations, processes, protocols and workflows;
and enforce applicable security and data access and use policies; and (4)
organizational and social structures and processes for collaborative and
coordinated activity across disciplinary and institutional boundaries.Comment: A Computing Community Consortium (CCC) white paper, 9 pages. arXiv
admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1604.0200
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