Engineering for Innovation

Increasingly, complex scientific applications are structured in terms of workflows. These applications are usually computationally and/or data intensive and thus are well suited for execution in grid environments. Distributed, geographically spread computing and storage resources are made available to scientists belonging to virtual organizations sharing resources across multiple administrative domains through established service-level agreements. Grids provide an unprecedented opportunity for distributed workflow execution; indeed, many applications are well beyond the capabilities of a single computer, and partitioning the overall computation on different components whose execution may benefit from runs on different architectures could provide better performances. In this paper we describe the design and implementation of the Grid Resource Broker (GRB) workflow engine. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Portals to computational/data grids provide the scientific community with a friendly environment in order to solve large-scale computational problems. The Grid Resource Broker (GRB) is a grid portal that allows trusted users to create and handle computational/data grids on the fly ...

This paper describes the Grid Resource Broker (GRB), a Grid portal built leveraging a set of high-level, Globus-Toolkit-based Grid libraries called GRB libraries. The portal leverages the Liferay framework to provide users with an intuitive, highly customizable Web GUI. The underlying GRB middleware allows trusted users seamless access to their computational Grid environments. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The grid computing paradigm emerged recently as a new field distinguished from traditional distributed computing because of its focus on large-scale resource sharing and innovative high-performance applications. The grid infrastructure ties together a number of Virtual Organizations, that reflect dynamic collections of individuals, institutions and computational resources. Flexible, secure and coordinated resource sharing among VOs requires the availability of an information rich environment to support resource discovery and decision making processes. The Globus Toolkit provides applications developers with the Monitoring and Discovery Service (MDS) to support development of grid-aware applications, able to exploit the knowledge about current grid status and configuration to adapt themselves to changes in heterogeneous, dynamic environments. In this paper we describe the design and implementation of the GridLab Information Service.

This report is concerned with the analysis of current Globus Toolkit Grid Information Service (GIS) to assess its capabilities and limitations. A comparison of GIS capabilities and GridLab dynamic grid computing requirements will provide the foundations to build needed extensions.

Remote-sensing data about the Earth's environment is being created and stored at an ever-increasing rate. To disseminate these valuable data, they must be delivered in a usable form to those who can interpret them and to those who would learn to interpret them. The aim of the paper is to demonstrate how remote-sensing data can be delivered using a web-browser as a front end, with distributed high performance computing services and replicated data archives. In particular, we show the implementation of supervised on-the-fly SAR processing: this goal can be achieved by an heterogeneous distributed computing environment in which high performance technologies and web interfaces are effectively utilized to provide animated, supervised, custom processed data. The architecture is designed to support both high and low-speed networking, both supercomputers and workstations, the result supporting both professional and casual users.

In this paper we describe a plug-in for the gSOAP Toolkit that allows development of Web Services exploiting the Globus Security Infrastructure (GSI). Our plug-in allows the development of GSI enabled Web Services and clients, with full support for mutual authentication/authorization, delegation of credentials and connection caching. The software provides automatic, transparent transport-level security for Web Services and is freely available.

The growing need of software infrastructure able to create, maintain and ease the evolution of scientific data, promotes the development of digital libraries in order to provide the user with fast and reliable access to data. In a world that is rapidly changing, the standard view of a digital library as a data repository specialized to a community of users and provided with some search tools is no longer tenable. To be effective, a digital library should be an active digital library, meaning that users can process available data not just to retrieve a particular piece of information, but to infer new knowledge about the data at hand. Digital Puglia is a new project, conceived to emphasize not only retrieval of data to the client's workstation, but also customized processing of the data. Such processing tasks may include data mining, filtering and knowledge discovery in huge databases, compute-intensive image processing (such as principal component analysis, supervised classification, or pattern matching) and on demand computing sessions. We describe the issues, the requirements and the underlying technologies of the Digital Puglia Project, whose final goal is to build a high performance distributed and active digital library of remote sensing data.

In this paper we present and discuss an architecture that allows transparent access to remote supercomputing facilities from a web gateway. The implementation exploits the Globus toolkit and provides users with fast, secure and reliable access to parallel applications. We show the usefulness of our approach in the context of Digital Puglia, an active digital library of remote sensing digital data.

In this paper we describe resource and service discovery mechanisms available in iGrid, a novel Grid Information Service based on the relational model. iGrid is developed within the GridLab project by the ISUFI Center for Advanced Computational Technologies (CACT) at the University of Lecce, Italy and it is deployed on the European GridLab testbed. The GridLab Information Service provides fast and secure access to both static and dynamic information through a GSI enabled web service. Besides publishing system information, iGrid also allow publication of user’s or service supplied information. The adoption of the relational model provides a flexible model for data, and the hierarchical distributed architecture provides scalability and fault tolerance.

Increasingly, complex scientific applications are structured in terms of workflows. These applications are usually computationally and/or data intensive and thus are well suited for execution in grid environments. Distributed, geographically spread computing and storage resources are made available to scientists belonging to virtual organizations sharing resources across multiple administrative domains through established service-level agreements. Grids provide an unprecedented opportunity for distributed workflow execution; indeed, many applications are well beyond the capabilities of a single computer, and partitioning the overall computation on different components whose execution may benefit from runs on different architectures could provide better performances. In this paper we describe the design and implementation of the Grid Resource Broker (GRB) workflow engine. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Portals to computational/data grids provide the scientific community with a friendly environment in order to solve large-scale computational problems. The Grid Resource Broker (GRB) is a grid portal that allows trusted users to create and handle computational/data grids on the fly exploiting a simple and friendly web-based GUI. GRB provides locationtransparent secure access to Globus services, automatic discovery of resources matching the user's criteria, selection and scheduling on behalf of the user. Moreover, users are not required to learn Globus and they do not need to write specialized code or to rewrite their existing legacy codes. We describe GRB architecture, its components and current GRB features addressing the main differences between our approach and related work in the area.

This paper describes the Grid Resource Broker (GRB), a Grid portal built leveraging a set of high-level, Globus-Toolkit-based Grid libraries called GRB libraries. The portal leverages the Liferay framework to provide users with an intuitive, highly customizable Web GUI. The underlying GRB middleware allows trusted users seamless access to their computational Grid environments. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The grid computing paradigm emerged recently as a new field distinguished from traditional distributed computing because of its focus on large-scale resource sharing and innovative high-performance applications. The grid infrastructure ties together a number of Virtual Organizations, that reflect dynamic collections of individuals, institutions and computational resources. Flexible, secure and coordinated resource sharing among VOs requires the availability of an information rich environment to support resource discovery and decision making processes. The Globus Toolkit provides applications developers with the Monitoring and Discovery Service (MDS) to support development of grid-aware applications, able to exploit the knowledge about current grid status and configuration to adapt themselves to changes in heterogeneous, dynamic environments. In this paper we describe the design and implementation of the GridLab Information Service.