G‐BLAST: a Grid‐based solution for mpiBLAST on computational Grids

Over the past few years, research and development in bioinformatics (e.g. genomic sequence alignment) has grown with each passing day fueling continuing demands for vast computing power to support better performance. This trend usually requires solutions involving parallel computing techniques because cluster computing technology reduces execution times and increases genomic sequence alignment efficiency. One example, mpiBLAST is a parallel version of NCBI BLAST that combines NCBI BLAST with message passing interface (MPI) standards. However, as most laboratories cannot build up powerful cluster computing environments, Grid computing framework concepts have been designed to meet the need. Grid computing environments coordinate the resources of distributed virtual organizations and satisfy the various computational demands of bioinformatics applications. In this paper, we report on designing and implementing a BioGrid framework, called G‐BLAST, that performs genomic sequence alignments using Grid computing environments and accessible mpiBLAST applications. G‐BLAST is also suitable for cluster computing environments with a server node and several client nodes. G‐BLAST is able to select the most appropriate work nodes, dynamically fragment genomic databases, and self‐adjust according to performance data. To enhance G‐BLAST capability and usability, we also employ a WSRF Grid Service Portal and a Grid Service GUI desk application for general users to submit jobs and host administrators to maintain work nodes. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Analysis and Provision of QoS for Distributed Grid Applications

Grid computing provides the infrastructure necessary to access and use distributed resources as part of virtual organizations. When used in this way, Grid computing makes it possible for users to participate in collaborative and distributed applications such as tele-immersion, visualization, and computational simulation. Some of these applications operate in a collaborative mode, requiring data to be stored and delivered in a timely manner. This class of applications must adhere to stringent real-time constraints and Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements. A QoS management approach is therefore required to orchestrate and guarantee the timely interaction between such applications and services. We discuss the design and a prototype implementation of a QoS system, and demonstrate how we enable Grid applications to become QoS compliant. We validate this approach through a case study of an image processing task derived from a nanoscale structures application.     

Telerobotic systems design based on real‐time CORBA

A new class of telerobotic applications is making its way into research laboratories, fine arts or science museums, and industrial installations. Virtual laboratories and remote equipment maintenance are examples of these applications, which are built exploiting distributed computing systems and Internet technologies. Distributed computing technologies provide several advantages to telerobotic applications, such as dynamic and multiuser access to remote resources and arbitrary user locations. Nonetheless, building these applications remains a substantial endeavor, especially when performance requirements must be met. The aim of this paper is to investigate how mainstream and advanced features of the CORBA object‐oriented middleware can be put to work to meet the requirements of novel telerobotic applications. We show that Real‐Time CORBA extensions and asynchronous method invocation of CORBA services can be relied upon to meet performance and functional requirements, thereby enabling teleoperation on local area networks. Furthermore, CORBA services for concurrency control and large‐scale data distribution enable geographic‐scale access for robot teleprogramming. Limitations in the currently available implementations of the CORBA standard are also discussed, along with their implications. The effectiveness and suitability for telerobotic applications of several CORBA mechanisms are tested first individually and then by means of a software framework exploiting CORBA services and ensuring component‐based development, software reuse, low development cost, fully portable real‐time and communication support. A comprehensive telerobotic application built based on the framework is described in the paper and evaluated on both local and wide area networks. The application includes a robot manipulator and several sensory subsystems under concurrent access by multiple competing or collaborating operators, one of which is equipped with a multimodal user interface acting as the master device. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Virtual workflow system for distributed collaborative scientific applications on Grids

Grid computing has become an effective computing technique in recent years. This paper develops a virtual workflow system to construct distributed collaborative applications for Grid users. The virtual workflow system consists three levels: abstract workflow system, translator and concrete workflow system. The research highlight of the implementation is that this workflow system is developed based on CORBA and Unicore Grid middleware. Furthermore, this implementation can support legacy application developed with Parco and C++ codes. This virtual workflow system can provide efficient GUI for users to organize distributed scientific collaborative applications and execute them on Grid resources. We present the design, implementation, and evaluation of this virtual workflow system in the paper.     

GeneGrid: Architecture, Implementation and Application

The emergence of Grid computing technology has opened up an unprecedented opportunity for biologists to share and access data, resources and tools in an integrated environment leading to a greater chance of knowledge discovery. GeneGrid is a Grid computing framework that seamlessly integrates a myriad of heterogeneous resources spanning multiple administrative domains and locations. It provides scientists an integrated environment for the streamlined access of a number of bioinformatics programs and databases through a simple and intuitive interface. It acts as a virtual bioinformatics laboratory by allowing scientists to create, execute and manage workflows that represent bioinformatics experiments. A number of cooperating Grid services interact in an orchestrated manner to provide this functionality. This paper gives insight into the details of the architecture, components and implementation of GeneGrid.     

Grid services for distributed system integration

Increasingly, computing addresses collaboration, data sharing, and interaction modes that involve distributed resources, resulting in an increased focus on the interconnection of systems both within and across enterprises. These evolutionary pressures have led to the development of Grid technologies. The authors' work focuses on the nature of the services that respond to protocol messages. Grid provides an extensible set of services that can be aggregated in various ways to meet the needs of virtual organizations, which themselves can be defined in part by the services they operate and share     

A hybrid positioning system for technology‐independent location‐aware computing

Location‐aware computing is a form of context‐aware mobile computing that refers to the ability of providing users with services that depend on their position. Locating the user terminal, often called positioning, is essential in this form of computing. Towards this aim, several technologies exist, ranging from personal area networking, to indoor, outdoor, and up to geographic area systems. Developers of location‐aware software applications have to face with a number of design choices, that typically depend on the chosen technology. This work addresses the problem of easing the development of pull location‐aware applications, by allowing uniform access to multiple heterogeneous positioning systems. Towards this aim, the paper proposes an approach to structure location‐aware mobile computing systems in a way independent of positioning technologies. The approach consists in structuring the system into a layered architecture, that provides application developers with a standard Java Application Programming Interface (JSR‐179 API), and encapsulates location data management and technology‐specific positioning subsystems into lower layers with clear interfaces. In order to demonstrate the proposed approach we present the development of HyLocSys. It is an open hybrid software architecture designed to support indoor/outdoor applications, which allows the uniform (combined or separate) use of several positioning technologies. HyLocSys uses a hybrid data model, which allows the integration of different location information representations (using symbolic and geometric coordinates). Moreover, it allows support to handset‐ and infrastructure‐based positioning approaches while respecting the privacy of the user. The paper presents a prototypal implementation of HyLocSys for heterogeneous scenarios. It has been implemented and tested on several platforms and mobile devices. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Introduce: An Open Source Toolkit for Rapid Development of Strongly Typed Grid Services

Service-oriented architectures and applications have gained wide acceptance in the Grid computing community. A number of tools and middleware systems have been developed to support application development using Grid Services architectures. Most of these efforts, however, have focused on low-level support for management and execution of Grid services, management of Grid-enabled resources, and deployment and execution of applications that make use of Grid services. Simple-to-use service development tools, which would allow a Grid service developer to leverage Grid technologies without needing to know low-level details, are becoming increasingly important for wider application of the Grid. In this paper, we describe an open-source, extensible toolkit, called Introduce, that supports easy development and deployment of Web Services Resource Framework (WSRF) compliant services. Introduce is designed to reduce the service development and deployment effort by hiding low level details of the Globus Toolkit and to enable the implementation of strongly typed services. In strongly typed services, a service produces and consumes data types that are well-defined and published in the Grid. This enables data-level syntactic interoperability so that clients and services can access and consume data elements programmatically and correctly. We expect that enabling strongly typed Grid services while lowering the difficulty of entry to the Grid via toolkits like Introduce will have a major impact to the success of the Grid and its wider adoption as a viable technology of choice in the commercial sector as well as in academic, medical, and government research.     

The Weka4WS framework for distributed data mining in service‐oriented Grids

The service‐oriented architecture paradigm can be exploited for the implementation of data and knowledge‐based applications in distributed environments. The Web services resource framework (WSRF) has recently emerged as the standard for the implementation of Grid services and applications. WSRF can be exploited for developing high‐level services for distributed data mining applications. This paper describes Weka4WS, a framework that extends the widely used open source Weka toolkit to support distributed data mining on WSRF‐enabled Grids. Weka4WS adopts the WSRF technology for running remote data mining algorithms and managing distributed computations. The Weka4WS user interface supports the execution of both local and remote data mining tasks. On every computing node, a WSRF‐compliant Web service is used to expose all the data mining algorithms provided by the Weka library. The paper describes the design and implementation of Weka4WS using the WSRF libraries and services provided by Globus Toolkit 4. A performance analysis of Weka4WS for executing distributed data mining tasks in different network scenarios is presented. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

网格环境下基于服务的分布式查询处理机制研究

OGSA-DQP是一种用于网格环境、基于服务的分布式查询处理系统,实现了运行在不同平台的分布式数据密集型应用的高级数据访问与集成服务方法,为用户提供一致的虚拟关系数据视图和分布式数据查询支持。文章描述了其体系结构、分析了其查询和优化机制,并在不同条件下测试了查询性能,为寻找系统查询性能瓶颈、提高系统查询响应时间提供依据。     

Service-oriented middleware for distributed data mining on the grid

Distribution of data and computation allows for solving larger problems and executing applications that are distributed in nature. The grid is a distributed computing infrastructure that enables coordinated resource sharing within dynamic organizations consisting of individuals, institutions, and resources. The grid extends the distributed and parallel computing paradigms allowing for resource negotiation and dynamical allocation, heterogeneity, open protocols, and services. Grid environments can be used both for compute-intensive tasks and data intensive applications by exploiting their resources, services, and data access mechanisms. Data mining algorithms and knowledge discovery processes are both compute and data intensive, therefore the grid can offer a computing and data management infrastructure for supporting decentralized and parallel data analysis. This paper discusses how grid computing can be used to support distributed data mining. Research activities in grid-based data mining and some challenges in this area are presented along with some promising future directions for developing grid-based distributed data mining.     

A distributed framework for multi-risk assessment of natural hazards used to model the effects of forest fire on hydrology and sediment yield

Within the European Commission-funded MEDIGRID project, Grid computing technology is used to integrate various natural hazard models and data sets, maintained independently at different centres in Europe, into a single system, accessible to users over the internet. Each centre forms a process (application) or data storage node and has been fitted with the Globus toolkit, which provides the distributed computing environment functionality that is required for the system set up. In addition, several Grid data management components were developed to allow the system to operate on different computing platforms. Access to the data and application management services is enabled through a Grid Portal. A series of portlets enable users to access the system, providing a personalised interface to the Grid. Integration of the individual models required them to be modified as web services, so as to be run remotely over the internet. As the models have different data characteristics, a common data format was adopted for creating harmonised data sets and allowing the exchange of data between the models. As an example, the Fire Spread Engine model is used to derive a map of areas that have been burnt by fire. This forms an input to the SHETRAN hydrology, soil erosion and landslide model, which in turn could provide data for other models such as vegetation regeneration. The use of the system is demonstrated for a site in south-west Spain where a large forest fire occurred on 2 August 2003. The MEDIGRID system marks an advance in the integration of independently constructed models to provide improved hazard assessment technology.     

The Legion support for advanced parameter-space studies on a grid

Parameter-space (p-space) studies involve running a single application several times with different parameter sets. Since the jobs are mutually independent, many computing resources can be recruited to conduct an entire study in a distributed manner. The p-space studies are attractive applications for grids, which are networked collections of computing and other resources. Legion is a grid infrastructure that facilitates the secure and easy use of heterogeneous, geographically distributed resources by providing the illusion of a single virtual machine from those resources. Legion provides tools and services that support advanced p-space studies, i.e., studies that make complex demands such as transparent access to distributed files, fault-tolerance and security. We demonstrate these benefits with a protein-folding experiment in which a molecular simulation package was run over a grid managed by Legion.     

网格服务创建方法及其在普适计算中的应用

通过研究普适应用对网格计算平台的内在需求,提出了在网格中创建大量瞬时服务以支持普适计算的理论与方法,给出了可重用的基本模块化网格服务的创建方法,包括构造标准化接口、抽象基本功能、部署运行时环境、集成应用系统以及在工程实践中设计瞬时服务的侧重点,并且在一个明确的网格工程背景下验证了该方法的简单、高效和安全性,瞬时服务随时随地可用,为用户提供了满意的服务.     

Using Grid services to parallelize IBM's Generic Log Adapter

Since their definition in the Open Grid Services Architecture, Grid services has been used in many Grid-enabled applications to leverage the computational power offered by Grid Systems. An important research issue addressed in this regard is how to increase the efficiency of the Grid services for a massive processing and scientific computing computations arising in data intensive computations, for example the processing of large log data files arising in “problem determination” in today's IT computing environments.In this paper we present an approach that uses Grid services to efficiently parallelize the IBM's Generic Log Adapter (GLA). GLA is a generic parsing engine shipped with the IBM's Autonomic Computing Toolkit that has been conceived to convert proprietary log data into a standard log data event-based format in real time. However, in order to provide generic support for parsing the majority of today's unstructured log data formats the GLA makes heavy use of regular expressions that incur in performance limitations. Until now all the approaches that have been proposed to increase GLA's performance have revolved around fine-tuning the set of regular expressions used to configure the GLA for a particular log data format or writing specific parsing code. In this work we propose a new approach consisting in transparently parallelizing the GLA by taking advantage of its internal architecture and the fact that structuring log data is a task that lends itself very well to parallelization. We present a Master-Worker strategy that uses Grid services to parallelize GLA efficiently and in a completely transparent way for the user.     

Mobile agent middleware for mobile computing

Mobile computing requires an advanced infrastructure that integrates suitable support protocols, mechanisms, and tools. This mobility middleware should dynamically reallocate and trace mobile users and terminals and permit communication and coordination of mobile entities. In addition, open and untrusted environments must overcome system heterogeneity and grant the appropriate security level. Solutions to these issues require compliance with standards to interoperate with different systems and legacy components and a reliable security infrastructure based on standard cryptographic mechanisms and tools. Many proposals suggest using mobile agent technology middleware to address these issues. A mobile agent moves entities in execution together with code and achieved state, making it possible to upgrade distributed computing environments without suspending service. We propose three mobile computing services: user virtual environment (UVE), mobile virtual terminal (MVT), and virtual resource management (VRM). UVE provides users with a uniform view of their working environments independent of current locations and specific terminals. MVT extends traditional terminal mobility by preserving the terminal execution state for restoration at new locations, including active processes and subscribed services. VRM permits mobile users and terminals to maintain access to resources and services by automatically requalifying the bindings and moving specific resources or services to permit load balancing and replication     

基于SOA的海量准实时数据服务平台接入/访问研究

电网数据已成为电力企业发展的重要资产,但缺乏有效的技术手段对准实时数据进行高效的接入/访问。从松耦合、可重复性、标准化等架构设计原则考虑,通过数据接入方案和数据访问方案设计并实现了基于SOA技术的海量准实时数据服务平台。平台通过设计的数据接入/访问工具将不同业务系统的准实时数据统一接入,以测点形式有序集成,并统一对外提供订阅、查询和获取所需数据访问服务来支撑业务应用。同时通过平台电网模型同步与模型树建立和高级应用支撑的关键技术,建立主网模型,并借助变电站设备模型挂接完成主网与配网模型拼接,形成电网标准的模型树,实现电网准实时数据的高效集成和访问,更好的满足电力企业准实时数据纵向贯通和横向交互的需求。     

Hybrid Cloud Architecture for Higher Education System

As technology improves, several modernization efforts are taken in the process of teaching and learning. An effective education system should maintain global connectivity, federate security and deliver self-access to its services. The cloud computing services transform the current education system to an advanced one. There exist several tools and services to make teaching and learning more interesting. In the higher education system, the data flow and basic operations are almost the same. These systems need to access cloud-based applications and services for their operational advancement and flexibility. Architecting a suitable cloud-based education system will leverage all the benefits of the cloud to its stakeholders. At the same time, educational institutions want to keep their sensitive information more secure. For that, they need to maintain their on-premises data center along with the cloud infrastructure. This paper proposes an advanced, flexible and secure hybrid cloud architecture to satisfy the growing demands of an education system. By sharing the proposed cloud infrastructure among several higher educational institutions, there is a possibility to implement a common education system among organizations. Moreover, this research demonstrates how a cloud-based education architecture can utilize the advantages of the cloud resources offered by several providers in a hybrid cloud environment. In addition, a reference architecture using Amazon Web Service (AWS) is proposed to implement a common university education system.     

AnyQuery:网格环境下基于服务的分布式查询处理系统

AnyQuery是一种适用于网格环境、基于服务的分布式查询处理系统，使用统一的数据格式（可扩展标记语言）来表示和传输数据，所有组成模块以网格服务的形式实现，网格服务之间通过标准的接口进行通信．这种接口和实现分离技术屏蔽了不同数据库及其运行节点的差异，为用户提供一致的虚拟关系数据视图和分布式数据查询支持．在分析和研究已有的并行数据库和分布式数据库查询技术的基础上，AnyQuery提出和实现了一种适用于动态网格环境的分布式查询计划生成和执行算法，该算法能够根据网格环境中各节点及其连接网络的实际情况确定查询计划，支持跨数据库的连接查询．基于Globus 3．0开发了AnyQuery的原型系统，性能测试表明该系统具有较好的可扩展性，尤其适合计算密集型的复杂查询．     

Multi‐wavelength image space: another Grid‐enabled science

We describe how the Grid enables new research possibilities in astronomy through multi‐wavelength images. To see sky images in the same pixel space, they must be projected to that space, a computer‐intensive process. There is thus a virtual data space induced that is defined by an image and the applied projection. This virtual data can be created and replicated with Planners and Replica catalog technology developed under the GriPhyN project. We plan to deploy our system (MONTAGE) on the U.S. Teragrid. Grid computing is also needed for ingesting data—computing background correction on each image—which forms a separate virtual data space. Multi‐wavelength images can be used for pushing source detection and statistics by an order of magnitude from current techniques; for optimization of multi‐wavelength image registration for detection and characterization of extended sources; and for detection of new classes of essentially multi‐wavelength astronomical phenomena. The paper discusses both the Grid architecture and the scientific goals. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.