GRAIL – Grid Access and Instrumentation Tool

Since the release of Globus Toolkit 4 Web services enrich the world of Grid Computing. They provide methods to develop modular Grid applications which can be parallelized easily. The access to Web services is mostly solved by complex command line tools which need a good deal of knowledge of the underlaying Grid technologies. GRAIL is intended to fill the gap between existing Grid access methods and both the developer who wants to utilize the Grid for own developments and the user who wants to access the Grid without much additional knowledge. It simplifies the access and the testing of Web services for the Globus Grid middleware. GRAIL provides an easy to use graphical user interface for executing Web services and enables the user to construct complex relationships between services to realize parallel execution. The underlying framework allows an easy integration of any Web service or other arbitrary task without much additional effort for the developer. Existing technologies, shipped with the Globus Toolkit, are seamlessly integrated into GRAIL

Architecture of the Grid Services Toolkit for Process Data Processing

Grid is a rapidly growing new technology that will provide easy access to huge amounts of computer resources, both hardware and software. As these resources become available soon, more and more scientific users are interested in benefiting from them. At this time the main problem accessing the Grid is that scientific users usually need big knowledge of Grid methods and technologies besides their own field of research. To fill the gap between high-level scientific Grid users and low-level functions in Grid environments the Grid Services Toolkit (GST) is developed at the IPE. Aimed to simplify and accelerate the development of parallelized scientific Grid applications, the GST is based on Web services extended by a rich client API. It is especially designed for the field of process data processing providing database access and management, common methods of statistical data analysis and project specific methods

NFFA-Europe Pilot - D9.1 - Deployment of the VA service prototypes

This Deliverable presents the prototype of the first Virtual Access service: an instance of the MetaStore, named MetaRepo. The service has been installed as a virtual machine hosted at KIT, and has been connected to the Single-Sign-On. The service can be accessed using a Graphical User Interface. A monitoring service on the MetaRepo side makes a call to the API of the database test instance at each action performed in the MetaRepo by logged-in users, in order to keep track of the activities of the Virtual Access service

Inspector computer

Inspector Computer is a real world application based on Grid technologies helping users to find stolen goods in the internet. All the user has to provide is a reference image and a short, textual description of the items he is searching for. After initialization Inspector Computer queries several existing search engines in the Internet to get the necessary data. From the results of the query the images are extracted and compared to the reference image. The sophisticated comparison methods score images by their content, i.e. if two images contain the same object. Even comparison of two images needs a lot of computing power and in general thousands of comparisons have to be done. So it is obvious that only a Grid provides the necessary resources for Inspector Computer. Finally a sorted list of the most likely hits is delivered

Reference installation for the German grid initiative D-Grid

The D-Grid reference installation is a test platform for the German grid initiative. The main task is to create the grid prototype for software and hardware components needed in the D-Grid community. For each grid-related task field different alternative middleware is included. With respect to changing demands from the community, new versions of the reference installation are released every six months