enabling access to astronomical databases through the grid a case study

In recent years great efforts have been spent in the astronomical community to allow a global and seamless electronic access to distributed astronomical data repositories, and to enable scientific analysis on them. A system capable of providing these services over distributed databases and computer resources is called a Virtual Observatory (VO). VOs are still in the study phase, with many projects around the world now delivering their first prototype implementations. In the meanwhile grid technologies have started to emerge and consolidate and are now expected to play a fundamental role in the development of Astrophysical Virtual Observatories. We report here about our activities aimed at integrating in the grid environment a system, developed in Padova, specifically designed for accessing very large astronomical catalogues. We evaluated several possible solutions, including the use of a tool for accessing databases developed by the European Data Grid (EDG) project, but finally we decided to adopt a web services based architecture, retaining the security infrastructure provided by the EDG software. We plan to evolve towards an implementation fully compliant with the latest Open Grid Service Architecture specification, but without loosing compatibility with the grid middleware adopted in our project. This work is being conducted in the framework of Grid.it, a project, funded by the Italian Ministry for Education, University and Research, aimed at studying a grid infrastructure for scientific research in Italy and developing specific software tools and protype applications that run on it. This catalogue access system will eventually become one of the first building blocks of the Italian Virtual Observatory, currently under development in the framework of a closely-related project, named DRACO. To this end, starting from the design phase of our system, and where applicable, we adopted the standards set forth by the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA)

Cloudbus Toolkit for Market-Oriented Cloud Computing

This keynote paper: (1) presents the 21st century vision of computing and identifies various IT paradigms promising to deliver computing as a utility; (2) defines the architecture for creating market-oriented Clouds and computing atmosphere by leveraging technologies such as virtual machines; (3) provides thoughts on market-based resource management strategies that encompass both customer-driven service management and computational risk management to sustain SLA-oriented resource allocation; (4) presents the work carried out as part of our new Cloud Computing initiative, called Cloudbus: (i) Aneka, a Platform as a Service software system containing SDK (Software Development Kit) for construction of Cloud applications and deployment on private or public Clouds, in addition to supporting market-oriented resource management; (ii) internetworking of Clouds for dynamic creation of federated computing environments for scaling of elastic applications; (iii) creation of 3rd party Cloud brokering services for building content delivery networks and e-Science applications and their deployment on capabilities of IaaS providers such as Amazon along with Grid mashups; (iv) CloudSim supporting modelling and simulation of Clouds for performance studies; (v) Energy Efficient Resource Allocation Mechanisms and Techniques for creation and management of Green Clouds; and (vi) pathways for future research.Comment: 21 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables, Conference pape

Towards a service-oriented e-infrastructure for multidisciplinary environmental research

Research e-infrastructures are considered to have generic and thematic parts. The generic part provids high-speed networks, grid (large-scale distributed computing) and database systems (digital repositories and data transfer systems) applicable to all research commnities irrespective of discipline. Thematic parts are specific deployments of e-infrastructures to support diverse virtual research communities. The needs of a virtual community of multidisciplinary envronmental researchers are yet to be investigated. We envisage and argue for an e-infrastructure that will enable environmental researchers to develop environmental models and software entirely out of existing components through loose coupling of diverse digital resources based on the service-oriented achitecture. We discuss four specific aspects for consideration for a future e-infrastructure: 1) provision of digital resources (data, models & tools) as web services, 2) dealing with stateless and non-transactional nature of web services using workflow management systems, 3) enabling web servce discovery, composition and orchestration through semantic registries, and 4) creating synergy with existing grid infrastructures

Development of Grid e-Infrastructure in South-Eastern Europe

Over the period of 6 years and three phases, the SEE-GRID programme has established a strong regional human network in the area of distributed scientific computing and has set up a powerful regional Grid infrastructure. It attracted a number of user communities and applications from diverse fields from countries throughout the South-Eastern Europe. From the infrastructure point view, the first project phase has established a pilot Grid infrastructure with more than 20 resource centers in 11 countries. During the subsequent two phases of the project, the infrastructure has grown to currently 55 resource centers with more than 6600 CPUs and 750 TBs of disk storage, distributed in 16 participating countries. Inclusion of new resource centers to the existing infrastructure, as well as a support to new user communities, has demanded setup of regionally distributed core services, development of new monitoring and operational tools, and close collaboration of all partner institution in managing such a complex infrastructure. In this paper we give an overview of the development and current status of SEE-GRID regional infrastructure and describe its transition to the NGI-based Grid model in EGI, with the strong SEE regional collaboration.Comment: 22 pages, 12 figures, 4 table