UNICORE and GRIP: experiences of grid middleware development

We describe our experiences with the UNICORE Grid environment. Several lessons of general applicability can be drawn in regard to user uptake and security. The principal lesson is that more effort should be taken to be made to meet the needs of the target user community of the middleware development. Novel workflow strategies, in particular, should not be imposed on an existing community

Semantically Resolving Type Mismatches in Scientific Workflows

Scientists are increasingly utilizing Grids to manage large data sets and execute scientific experiments on distributed resources. Scientific workflows are used as means for modeling and enacting scientific experiments. Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) is a major component of Microsoft’s .NET technology which offers lightweight support for long-running workflows. It provides a comfortable graphical and programmatic environment for the development of extended BPEL-style workflows. WF’s visual features ease the syntactic composition of Web services into scientific workflows but do nothing to assure that information passed between services has consistent semantic types or representations or that deviant flows, errors and compensations are handled meaningfully. In this paper we introduce SAWSDL-compliant annotations for WF and use them with a semantic reasoner to guarantee semantic type correctness in scientific workflows. Examples from bioinformatics are presented

Version Control in Online Software Repositories

Software version control repositories provide a uniform and stable interface to manage documents and their version histories. Unfortunately, Open Source systems, for example, CVS, Subversion, and GNU Arch are not well suited to highly collaborative environments and fail to track semantic changes in repositories. We introduce document provenance as our Description Logic framework to track the semantic changes in software repositories and draw interesting results about their historic behaviour using a rule-based inference engine. To support the use of this framework, we have developed our own online collaborative tool, leveraging the fluency of the modern WikiWikiWeb

Version Control in Online Software Repositories

Software version control repositories provide a uniform and stable interface to manage documents and their version histories. Unfortunately, Open Source systems, for example, CVS, Subversion, and GNU Arch are not well suited to highly collaborative environments and fail to track semantic changes in repositories. We introduce document provenance as our Description Logic framework to track the semantic changes in software repositories and draw interesting results about their historic behaviour using a rule-based inference engine. To support the use of this framework, we have developed our own online collaborative tool, leveraging the fluency of the modern WikiWikiWeb

Successful Indian model in producing modern computers

Interview of Denis Nicole by Taban Panahi

Mitotic Regulation of Protein Kinase CK2

Protein kinase CK2 is a serine/threonine kinase with a multitude of substrates and roles in many cellular processes, including mitosis. CK2 is constitutively active, yet we hypothesize that CK2 is indeed regulated in mitosis through subtle means, enabling CK2 to perform its functions unique to cell division. Our aims were to examine the roles of mitotic phosphorylation, subcellular localization, and interplay with mitotic kinases in the regulation of CK2 activity. We first examined the role of four highly conserved mitotic phosphorylation sites located in the unique C-terminus of CK2α. Phosphospecific antibodies generated against the sites show that CK2α phosphorylation is temporally regulated and occurs during prophase and metaphase during normal mitotic progression. Proper phosphorylation of CK2α is required for proper mitotic progression, as stable cell lines expressing phosphorylation site mutants of CK2α display severe mitotic defects. We next examined the impact of these phosphorylation events on the subcellular localization of CK2. We show that CK2α, but not CK2α’, localizes to the mitotic spindle. Localization of CK2α to the mitotic spindle is phosphodependent, and requires the peptidyl-prolyl isomerase Pin1. These results are a rare example of functional divergence between the two catalytic isoforms of CK2, and suggest that the role of CK2α phosphorylation during mitosis is to promote localization of CK2 to the mitotic spindle. Finally, we examined the possibility that CK2 activity during mitosis is regulated through hierarchal phosphorylation events, wherein CK2 would phosphorylate proteins only after priming phosphorylation events catalyzed by other mitotic kinases, particularly Cdk1. As this phenomenon has never been systematically investigated, we have investigated the consensus requirements for CK2 primed phosphorylation, and in particular Cdk/CK2 hierarchical phosphorylation. A genome-wide search for potential mitotic substrates matching the consensus sequence suggests that Cdk1/CK2 hierarchical phosphorylation may indeed contribute to mitotic signaling, particularly on the mitotic spindle. Taken together, our results confirm the importance of CK2 in mitotic cell division, and highlight several examples of subtle regulation of CK2, through phosphorylation, subcellular localization, and interplay with other protein kinases. This helps explain how CK2, a constitutively active kinase, can participate in tightly regulated cellular processes like mitosis

Relever le défi de la diversité : une comparaison des idéologies en éducation en contexte minoritaire et majoritaire au Nouveau-Brunswick et en Saskatchewan

En dépit d’efforts récents par les gouvernements fédéral et provinciaux et par le milieu associatif pour augmenter le nombre d’immigrants, les communautés francophones en milieu minoritaire au Canada en reçoivent très peu. En conséquence, très peu de programmes et de services particuliers existent pour les quelques élèves issus de l’immigration. Les défis sont particulièrement aigus pour les provinces où l’immigration est faible même du côté majoritaire. Dans cet article, nous faisons un inventaire des politiques ministérielles et des programmes scolaires touchant l’accueil et l’intégration des élèves immigrants, du côté anglophone en comparaison avec le côté francophone en Saskatchewan et au Nouveau-Brunswick. Nous constatons tout d’abord une certaine disparité entre les anglophones et les francophones, mais aussi un manque d’harmonisation entre les diverses mesures, qui demeurent généralement à un stade expérimental. Globalement, ces mesures se situent dans une approche idéologique de type multiculturaliste participative, c’est-à-dire où on tient compte des différences portées par les immigrants, mais surtout pour leur permettre individuellement de rejoindre les autres élèves. Toutefois, le manque d’encadrement de ces mesures et l’absence de programmes créent d’importantes disparités entre les écoles, même sur le plan de l’approche idéologique.Despite recent efforts by federal and provincial governments and the community milieu to increase the number of immigrants, French speaking sectors in Canadian minority areas receive very few. Consequently, few programs and specific services exist for the small number of immigrant students. The challenges are particularly acute for provinces with low immigration levels, even on the majority side. In this article, we make an inventory of ministerial policies and school programs in Saskatchewan and New-Brunswick geared to welcoming and integrating immigrant students in the English-speaking schools compared to the French-speaking schools. First of all, we notice a certain discrepancy between Anglophone and Francophone schools, along with a lack of harmonization among the various measures, which generally remain at an experimental stage. Overall, these measures lie in a participative and multiculturalist ideological approach, which take the immigrants’ differences into account and above all, allows them to reach out individually to other students. However, the lack of supervision for these measures and the absence of programs create considerable discrepancies among schools, even in terms of the ideological approach.A pesar de los recientes esfuerzos de los gobiernos federal y provincial y del medio asociativo tratando de aumentar el número de inmigrantes, las comunidades francófonas en medio minoritario en Canadá acogen muy pocos inmigrantes. Lógicamente, existen pocos programas y servicios particulares para los alumnos provenientes de la inmigración. Los desafíos son particularmente agudos en las provincias en donde la inmigración es débil, incluso del lado mayoritario. En este artículo, hemos inventariado las políticas ministeriales y los programas escolares relacionados con la recepción y la integración de alumnos inmigrantes, comparando el lado anglófono con el lado francófono en Saskatchewan y en Nuevo Brunswick. Por principio hemos constatado una cierta disparidad entre anglófonos y francófonos, así como la ausencia de armonización entre las diversas medidas, que invariablemente quedan en un estadio experimental. Globalmente, dichas medidas se sitúan al interior de un enfoque ideológico de tipo multicultural participativo, en el cual se toman en cuenta las diferencias propias de los inmigrantes, sobre todo con el fin de permitir a los alumnos de emparejarse con el resto del grupo. Sin embargo, la ausencia de directivas y de programas para dichas medidas, provocan disparidades importantes entre las escuelas, incluso en lo concerniente al enfoque ideológico