Grid-enabled Workflows for Industrial Product Design

This paper presents a generic approach for developing and using Grid-based workflow technology for enabling cross-organizational engineering applications. Using industrial product design examples from the automotive and aerospace industries we highlight the main requirements and challenges addressed by our approach and describe how it can be used for enabling interoperability between heterogeneous workflow engines

Cross-middleware Interoperability in Distributed Concurrent Engineering

Secure, distributed collaboration between different organizations is a key challenge in Grid computing today. The GDCD project has produced a Grid-based demonstrator Virtual Collaborative Facility (VCF) for the European Space Agency. The purpose of this work is to show the potential of Grid technology to support fully distributed concurrent design, while addressing practical considerations including network security, interoperability, and integration of legacy applications. The VCF allows domain engineers to use the concurrent design methodology in a distributed fashion to perform studies for future space missions. To demonstrate the interoperability and integration capabilities of Grid computing in concurrent design, we developed prototype VCF components based on ESA’s current Excel-based Concurrent Design Facility (a non-distributed environment), using a STEP-compliant database that stores design parameters. The database was exposed as a secure GRIA 5.1 Grid service, whilst a .NET/WSE3.0-based library was developed to enable secure communication between the Excel client and STEP database

Dynamic Trust Federation in Grids

Grids are becoming economically viable and productive tools. Grids provide a way of utilizing a vast array of linked resources such as computing systems, databases and services online within Virtual Organizations (VO). However, today’s Grid architectures are not capable of supporting dynamic, agile federation across multiple administrative domains and the main barrier, which hinders dynamic federation over short time scales is security. Federating security and trust is one of the most significant architectural issues in Grids. Existing relevant standards and specifications can be used to federate security services, but do not directly address the dynamic extension of business trust relationships into the digital domain. In this paper we describe an experiment in which we highlight those challenging architectural issues and we will further describe how the approach that combines dynamic trust federation and dynamic authorization mechanism can address dynamic security trust federation in Grids. The experiment made with the prototype described in this paper is used in the NextGRID project for the definition of requirements for next generation Grid architectures adapted to business application need

Resilient Critical Infrastructure Management using Service Oriented Architecture

Abstract—The SERSCIS project aims to support the use of interconnected systems of services in Critical Infrastructure (CI) applications. The problem of system interconnectedness is aptly demonstrated by ‘Airport Collaborative Decision Making’ (ACDM). Failure or underperformance of any of the interlinked ICT systems may compromise the ability of airports to plan their use of resources to sustain high levels of air traffic, or to provide accurate aircraft movement forecasts to the wider European air traffic management systems. The proposed solution is to introduce further SERSCIS ICT components to manage dependability and interdependency. These use semantic models of the critical infrastructure, including its ICT services, to identify faults and potential risks and to increase human awareness of them. Semantics allows information and services to be described in such a way that makes them understandable to computers. Thus when a failure (or a threat of failure) is detected, SERSCIS components can take action to manage the consequences, including changing the interdependency relationships between services. In some cases, the components will be able to take action autonomously — e.g. to manage ‘local’ issues such as the allocation of CPU time to maintain service performance, or the selection of services where there are redundant sources available. In other cases the components will alert human operators so they can take action instead. The goal of this paper is to describe a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) that can be used to address the management of ICT components and interdependencies in critical infrastructure systems. Index Terms—resilience; QoS; SOA; critical infrastructure, SLA

Bipartite electronic SLA as a business framework to support cross-organization load management of real-time online applications

Online applications such as games and e-learning applications fall within the broader category of real-time online interactive applications (ROIA), a new class of ‘killer’ application for the Grid that is being investigated in the edutain@grid project. The two case studies in edutain@grid are an online game and an e-learning training application. We present a novel Grid-based business framework that makes use of bipartite service level agreements (SLAs) and dynamic invoice models to model complex business relationships in a massively scalable and flexible way. We support cross-organization load management at the business level, through zone migration. For evaluation we look at existing and extended value chains, the quality of service (QoS) metrics measured and the dynamic invoice models that support this work. We examine the causal links from customer quality of experience (QoE) and service provider quality of business (QoBiz) through to measured quality of service. Finally we discuss a shared reward business ecosystem and suggest how extended service level agreements and invoice models can support this

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

Distributed Management of Grid-based Scientific Workflows

Grids and service-oriented technologies are emerging as dominant approaches for distributed systems. With the evolution of these technologies, scientific workflows have been introduced as a tool for scientists to assemble highly specialized applications, and to exchange large heterogeneous datasets in order to automate and accelerate the accomplishment of complex scientific tasks. Several Scientific Workflow Management Systems (SWfMS) have already been designed to support the specification, execution, and monitoring of scientific workflows. Meanwhile, they still face key challenges from two different perspectives: system usability and system efficiency. From the system usability perspective, current SWfMS are not designed to be simple enough for scientists who have quite limited IT knowledge. What’s more, there is no easy mechanism by which scientists can share and re-use scientific experiments that have already been designed and proved by others. From the perspective of system efficiency, existing SWfMS are coordinating and executing workflows in a centralized fashion using a single scheduler and / or a workflow enactor. This creates a single point of failure, forms a scalability bottleneck, and enforces centralized fault handling. In addition, they don’t consider load balancing while mapping abstract jobs onto several computational nodes. Another important challenge exists due to the common nature of scientific workflow applications, that need to exchange a huge amount of data during the execution process. Some available SWfMS use a mediator-based approach for data transfer where data must be transferred first to a centralized data manager, which is completely inefficient. Other SWfMS apply a peer-to-peer approach via data references. Even this approach is not sufficient for scientific workflows as a single complex scientific activity can produce an extensive amount of data. In this thesis, we introduce SWIMS (Scientific Workflow Integration and Management System) framework. It employs the Web Services technology to originate a distributed management system for data-intensive scientific workflows. The purpose of SWIMS is to overcome the previously mentioned challenges through a set of salient features: i) Support for distributed execution and management of workflows, ii) diminution of communication traffic, iii) support for smart re-run, iv) distributed fault handling and load balancing, v) ease of use, and vi) extensive sharing of scientific workflows. We discuss the motivation, design, and implementation of the SWIMS framework. Then, we evaluate it through the Montage application from the astronomy domain