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

A Formal Architecture-Centric Model-Driven Approach for the Automatic Generation of Grid Applications

This paper discusses the concept of model-driven software engineering applied to the Grid application domain. As an extension to this concept, the approach described here, attempts to combine both formal architecture-centric and model-driven paradigms. It is a commonly recognized statement that Grid systems have seldom been designed using formal techniques although from past experience such techniques have shown advantages. This paper advocates a formal engineering approach to Grid system developments in an effort to contribute to the rigorous development of Grids software architectures. This approach addresses quality of service and cross-platform developments by applying the model-driven paradigm to a formal architecture-centric engineering method. This combination benefits from a formal semantic description power in addition to model-based transformations. The result of such a novel combined concept promotes the re-use of design models and facilitates developments in Grid computing.Comment: 11 pages, 9 figures. Proc of the 8th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS06) Paphos, Cyprus. May 200

CReATIVE-B Deliverable D3.2: Guidelines for interoperability for biodiversity and ecosystem research infrastructures

Deliverable D3.2 “Guidelines for Interoperability”, prepared on the basis of available information at the time of writing, is the output of CReATIVE-B tasks T3.3 and T3.4, which aims to “Prepare guidelines for interoperability (for biodiversity and ecosystem research infrastructures)”. It provides a resume of the conclusions about the status and achievability of interoperability existing between the surveyed e-Infrastructures. It highlights the currently known obstacles and makes suggestions for overcoming these. Using a typical use-case drawn from contemporary work on Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBV) the document defines some typical scenarios of interoperability that can be supported by several or all e-Infrastructures. The use-case is mapped to the most likely scenario but further work is required at each of 3 levels of interoperability (applications, service logic, resources) to illustrate how each research infrastructure may support the use case. Building on Deliverable D3.1, on the existing similarities and differences between participating research infrastructures, Deliverable D3.2 aims at presenting a set of guidelines for overcoming obstacles to interoperability. It advises on a roadmap for medium-term (5-7 years) convergence towards worldwide technical interoperability of biodiversity and ecosystem research infrastructures. Thus, it forms a solid knowledge basis for recommendations on resolution of interoperability in the medium to long-term (deliverable D3.3)

GINSENG : une grille dédiée à l'e-santé et l'épidémiologie

Emerging challenge concerning public health statistics is the ability to provide real time information on population health. It is especially relevant in case of emergency scenarios: pollution through toxic gas emission or radioactivity, heat waves, pandemic flu viruses. The daily improvement of care practice can also benefit of any real time information on patients hosted in medical structures. To face this problematic, the french GINSENG project uses the european grid technology to create a sentinel network for e-health and epidemiology. This distributed network architecture offers many advantages: * Medical data banks from each hospital or labs can be interrogated directly without centralizing any information * Such architecture is then really cost effective. * Statistical studies will be soon available in real time through a web interface accessible by the medical staff. While patient data consistency can mainly be achieved by working on medical databases standardization, patient identification and medical data linkage mechanisms are performed dynamically through the grid network. Authentication and data encryption are ensured by healthcare professional smartcards containing an X509 grid-compatible certificate delivered by a trusted certification authority. The GINSENG project focuses on two fields: cancer surveillance and perinatal health

CReATIVE-B Deliverable D3.1: Comparison of technical basis of biodiversity e-infrastructures

Deliverable D3.1, prepared on the basis of available information at the time of writing, is the output of CReATIVE-B task T3.1, which aims to “Compare the technical basis of e-infrastructures for biodiversity research”. It provides a synopsis comparison of the technical approaches of the e-infrastructures analysed within the scope of the project and elaborates the interoperability analysis by defining it and making a quantitative comparison of the technical facts gathered thus far. It reflects as accurately as possible the technical findings, structured along dimensions of interoperability that match the functional areas and layers of the research infrastructures being analysed. Deliverable D3.1 aims at shedding light on existing similarities and differences between participating research infrastructures thus forming a solid information and knowledge basis for future interoperability guidelines developments in D3.2 and D3.3