Rapid Development of Usable Grid Middleware
Partners: UCL and Manchester, Oxford and Southampton Universities
The central aim of this EPSRC-funded e-Science Best Practice project is to develop and apply lightweight Grid middleware, which is easy to install, maintain and manage, through a process of rapid prototyping. The intended user community are existing Grid projects and their end-user communities, including Integrative Biology. The primary advantage of this rapid prototyping approach is to increase the involvement of users in the software development process and therefore to improve the usability of the UK Grid infrastructure for scientifically productive applications. The technology will facilitate workflows of services and steering of applications, both of which are important goals of many projects.
The principle objectives of the project are:
- To evolve the lightweight middleware for deploying applications as services, presently called OGSI::Lite, to the currently proposed WSRF standard and deploy this in the codes within the project together with supporting documentation. This complements work in the RealityGrid project.
- To extend the RealityGrid Steering API to a limited number of specific application codes including Integrative Biology. The existing steering functionality will be only minimally extended but bug fixing and adaptation to a wider range of codes and environments will improve the generality of its functionality. It will be fully documented and bug-reporting and testing procedures developed.
- To capture the experience of application scientists within the collaborating projects in documentation, FAQs, and web sites for document sharing. This will provide a basis for increasing uptake of the new middleware and steering techniques in the relevant communities.
- To develop interoperability of myGrid workflows and RealityGrid services, both of which are being used by Integrative Biology, and to investigate the possibility of applying the RealityGrid interactive access features (steering and monitoring) using the myGrid environment.
- To improve the security of the OGSI::Lite grid service container.
- To collect the above developments together, documented and engineered to a consistent, professional level of quality, and then release them as part of a coherent software distribution via OMII.