Helmholtz Portfolio Theme Large-Scale Data Management and Analysis (LSDMA)

The Helmholtz Association funded the "Large-Scale Data Management and Analysis" portfolio theme from 2012-2016. Four Helmholtz centres, six universities and another research institution in Germany joined to enable data-intensive science by optimising data life cycles in selected scientific communities. In our Data Life cycle Labs, data experts performed joint R&D together with scientific communities. The Data Services Integration Team focused on generic solutions applied by several communities

Cyberaide JavaScript: A Web Application Development Framework for Cyberinfrastructure

This thesis work introduces a service oriented architecture based Grid abstraction framework that allows users to access Grid infrastructure through JavaScript. Such a framework integrates well with other Web 2.0 technologies since it provides JavaScript toolkit to build web applications. The framework consists of two essential parts. A client Application Programming lnterface (API) to access the Grid via JavaScript and a full service stack in server side through which the Grid access is channeled. The framework uses commodity Web service standards and provides extended functionality such as asynchronous task management, file transfer, etc. The availability of this framework simplifies not only the development of new services, but also the development of advanced client side Grid applications that can be accessed through Web browsers. The effectiveness of the framework is demonstrated by providing an Grid portal example that integrates a variety of useful services to be accessed through a JavaScript enabled client desktop via a Web browser, as well as the opensocial gadgets for Grid task management and file transfer. Overall, Grid developers will have another tool at their disposal that projects a simpler way to distribute and maintain cyberinfrastructure related software, while simultaneously delivering advanced interfaces and integrating social services for the scientific community

A formal architecture-centric and model driven approach for the engineering of science gateways

From n-Tier client/server applications, to more complex academic Grids, or even the most recent and promising industrial Clouds, the last decade has witnessed significant developments in distributed computing. In spite of this conceptual heterogeneity, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) seems to have emerged as the common and underlying abstraction paradigm, even though different standards and technologies are applied across application domains. Suitable access to data and algorithms resident in SOAs via so-called ‘Science Gateways’ has thus become a pressing need in order to realize the benefits of distributed computing infrastructures.In an attempt to inform service-oriented systems design and developments in Grid-based biomedical research infrastructures, the applicant has consolidated work from three complementary experiences in European projects, which have developed and deployed large-scale production quality infrastructures and more recently Science Gateways to support research in breast cancer, pediatric diseases and neurodegenerative pathologies respectively. In analyzing the requirements from these biomedical applications the applicant was able to elaborate on commonly faced issues in Grid development and deployment, while proposing an adapted and extensible engineering framework. Grids implement a number of protocols, applications, standards and attempt to virtualize and harmonize accesses to them. Most Grid implementations therefore are instantiated as superposed software layers, often resulting in a low quality of services and quality of applications, thus making design and development increasingly complex, and rendering classical software engineering approaches unsuitable for Grid developments.The applicant proposes the application of a formal Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) approach to service-oriented developments, making it possible to define Grid-based architectures and Science Gateways that satisfy quality of service requirements, execution platform and distribution criteria at design time. An novel investigation is thus presented on the applicability of the resulting grid MDE (gMDE) to specific examples and conclusions are drawn on the benefits of this approach and its possible application to other areas, in particular that of Distributed Computing Infrastructures (DCI) interoperability, Science Gateways and Cloud architectures developments