Content about Middleware

Project Profile - From grids to clouds and beyond: GRNET supports Greek researchers

The Acropolis from Philipapou Hill at sunset, Image courtesy Tim Rogers, stock.xchng

All Greek universities get their internet from one source: GRNET (Greek Research and Education Network), a company supported by the Greek state, which connects them both to each other and to the larger pan-European academic network, GÉANT.
GRNET’s mission is to get universities on line, to provide computing power and storage, and to develop services for researchers. Not the least of which is providing technical know-how and supporting schools and universities in Greece. “GRNET is actually a human network — this is the most important thing about it,” says Kostas Koumantaros, member of GRNET in Athens. “We transfer know-how between universities throughout Greece. It is a good vehicle to both promote research in Greece and for us to learn from our international collabora

Announcement - ALENEX11 papers due 5 October

This spot on Telegraph Hill overlooks the bay in San Francisco, where ALENEX11 will take place. Image courtesy of Wally Gobetz, under Creative Commons 2.0.

The Workshop on Algorithm Engineering and Experiments (ALENEX11) will be held on 22 January 2011 at the Holiday Inn San Francisco Golden Gateway, San Francisco, California, US; papers are due 5 October 2010.
The aim of the ALENEX workshop is to provide a forum for presentation of original research in the implementation and experimental evaluation of algorithms and data structures. We invite submissions that present significant case studies in experimental analysis (such studies may tighten, extend, or otherwise improve current theoretical results) or in the implementation, testing, and evaluation of algorithms for realistic environments and scenarios, including specific applied areas (for example, databases, networks, operations research, computational biology and physics, computational ge

Announcement - WLCG middleware from CESGA

Image courtesy CESGA

Parts of the middleware that the WLCG relies upon will come from software developed by the Super-computing Center of Galicia, Spain (CESGA), a super-computing center that has developed an accounting portal for gLite middleware. This portal is used to analyse the computer usage on the grid network to primarily understand, from a statistical perspective, the distribution of resources. CESGA will continue to maintain the accounting portal when the EGI is in full swing and will collaborate with grid projects in each European country under the EGI umbrella. These countries will have their own National Grid Initiatives (NGI) that will feed back to EGI management.Additionally, the Galician Super-computing center has developed a metrics portal, which automatically gathers information to quantify, and objectively measure project progress and achievements quickly. Moreover, CESGA is currently collaborating with the LIP Association (Por

Feature - Wireless grids: Squeezing a grid onto a widget

This diagram shows the layers from which WiGiT is composed.
Image courtesy WiGiT.

As wireless devices become increasingly common, and common devices become increasingly “smart,” wireless grids become increasingly practical. That means that the timing is perfect for WiGiT, a wireless grid testbed which will begin testing its alpha software in June.
The purpose of WiGiT (Wireless Grids innovation Testbed), according to the Syracuse University project leader Lee McKnight, is to refine open specifications for a wireless grid standard, and create a stable platform for experimentation.
“With WiGiT we expect to be able to do these large scale experiments from campus to campus, and we can run little experiments on that,” McKnight said. “Open specifications will make it easier for others to latch on.”
WiGiT, a National Science Foundation-Partners for Innovation program-funded collaboration between

Feature - Frontier guides computing through the collision landscape

Just like you might have trouble navigating using this antique map, detector experiments can’t make sense of their data using an out-of-date map of their detector. Image courtesy Boston Public Library’s Norman B. Leventhal Map Center under Creative Commons license

The colossal particle detectors that monitor collisions at the Tevatron in Illinois and the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland are unique beasts.
Scientists design most of the parts inside them to meet an individual set of specifications. But every once in a while, they find something the detectors can share.
Scientists at the CMS and ATLAS experiments at CERN are using a software system that Fermilab’s Computing Division originally designed for the CDF experiment at the Tevatron. The system, called Frontier, helps scientists distribute at lightning speed information needed to interpret collision data. The system is based upon the wid

Link of the week - eScience and Google Summer of Code

This summer marks the sixth edition of Google Summer of Code. Around 1000 student programmers from around the world will be offered a $5000 stipend to work with one of 152 open source mentor organizations, creating a substantial body of new open source code.
Last week Google announced this year’s list of participating open source projects, and a number of them are closely tied with grids, clouds, or computer-assisted science.
Is your project missing from this list? Email us to have it added!
ASCEND – A software program for solving small to very large mathematical models, including non-linear equations, linear and non-linear optimization problems, and dynamic systems expressed in the form of differential/algebraic equations.
Encyclopedia of Life – A single portal providing information on all 1.9 million known species by aggregating data from thousands of sites using novel informatics tools. Sponsored by the Marine Biol

Announcement - Call for papers, CLADE, deadline 1 March, Chicago

Under the ‘El’ in Chicago.
Image courtesy of Brad Martyna, stock.exchng

Papers are now being accepted for CLADE (Challenges of Large Applications in Distributed Environments); the deadline is 1 March for this Chicago, Illinois, event.
Subjects to be covered at CLADE are applicable to science, engineering, medicine, business, economics, education, and other disciplines. They  include recent results on large scale  innovative applications that use distributed heterogeneous and dynamic computing environments.
Topics of interest will illustrate advances in:

Large-scale distributed applications, both computation- and data-centric
Application-specific portals in distributed environments
Distributed problem-solving environments
Distributed, collaborative science applications
Large, distributed data analysis
Applications with heterogeneous spatial and temporal characteristics
Distr

Feature - Transferring FTP to the cloud: Off of desktop, out of mind

Kettimuthu’s team chose the 10 terabyte data set shown in this image for the Bandwidth Challenge. The data, which comes from the World Climate Research Program Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, simulates temperature change at the Earth’s surface and zonally-averaged throughout the atmosphere from 1900-2100. Image courtesy of Rajkumar Kettimuthu.

Don’t shut down. Don’t reboot. Don’t disconnect. And don’t even think about closing the window. Securely and rapidly transferring large amounts of data with GridFTP comes with a lot of “don’ts.”
That’s why the Globus Alliance team led by Steve Tuecke, a researcher at Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago, decided to create a hosted data movement service dubbed Globus.org.
Take a 10 terabyte transfer using GridFTP as an example. “On a typical network it takes about two days,” said

Feature - HSVO connects the dots A screen capture of HSVO's patient simulator user interface. This mock-up of the patient simulator used videos from a training scenario in which students had to save the life of a teenager severely injured during a basketball game. An advanced mannequin stands in for the teenager. During this particular scenario, the students and mannequin were located in Montreal, the mannequin operator and a tutor were in Ottawa, and another tutor was located in Sudbury, Ontario. Image courtesy of McGill University and HSVO. Don’t let the name of Health Services Virtual Organization fool you. If HSVO is a success, it will be proof of concept for generic middleware that enables cloud-based workflows to access any number of services. And that could have implications for any scientific field. Web portals that give researchers access to data, services, applications and computational resources are becoming increasingly common. Researchers can access a variety of servi

Q & A - Smart data handling: An interview with Tevfik Kosar

Image courtesy Tevfik Kosar

In e-science, we are constantly striving to improve performance and speed so that we can complete a larger number of more complex computations faster. Tevfik Kosar, a researcher at Louisiana State University, is working on two intertwined projects that could together lead to the sorts of improvements we hope for. Read on to find out what he had to say.
iSGTW: You just received a National Science Foundation grant to work on the Stork Data Scheduler. Can you tell us a little about that project?
Kosar: The funding for the development of Stork Data Scheduler comes from NSF's Strategic Technologies for CyberInfrastructure program. The STCI program funds innovative cyberinfrastructure services which have the potential to significantly advance research capabilities in multiple areas of science and engineering. The grant will provide three years of funding for the enhancement of the Stork Data Scheduler

Feature - Do more with MATLAB

Using MATLAB on EGEE middleware, researchers can make a better laser - such as this solid state Cornellium Cn3+ laser created by a sapphire crystal. Image courtesy MATLAB Central

Researchers from disciplines as far apart as lasers and finance have a new computing tool at their fingertips: MATLAB can now run on Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) computing power. The software is a high-level language and interactive environment that enables users to perform computationally intensive tasks faster than with traditional programming languages such as C, C++, and Fortran. Widely regarded as a  powerful piece of simulation software, for use in everything from optimizing rocket launch control settings to vector analysis, it is now fully compatible with any grid computing system using gLite middleware.“Our motivation for incorporating this tool was rather straightforward. MATLAB is one of the most popular and important general-purpose scientific software