Grid Technologies

Data Grid Activities in SEEK and UK
Chairs: Watson & Rajasekar

In this session, we plan to explore the state of art of data grid technologies developed and used in the SEEK project and in UK DataGrid. Design and details of the EcoGrid, the data grid component of SEEK will be presented along with details of various activities being conducted as part of the UK DataGrid. The second part of the session is aimed at building consensus and collaboration between the two groups.

The aim of the session is to initiate a discussion between SEEK and the UK DataGrid community on data grid issues, problems, and solutions relevant to ecological and environmental research. We hope this will lead to opportunities for collaboration in the future that would provide a common design and development framework and technology transfer that would benefit ecological and environmental research.

      09:00-09:30   EcoGrid Design &  Architecture  (Rajasekar & Jones)
      09:30-10:00   EcoGrid Interfaces (Vieglais)
      10:00-10:30   EcoGrid Services (Zhu, Tao  &  Spears)
      10:30-11:00   Tea and Coffee
      11.00-11.15   Introduction. Paul Watson, Newcastle University
      11.15-12.00   DataGrid Projects at Daresbury Labs, Ananta Manadhar
      12.00-12.30   Eldas. Stephen Rutherford, Edikt Project
      12:30-14:00   Lunch
      14:00-14:45   Demos from Ecogrid & UK Data Grid
      14:45-15:30   Rump Session
      15:30-16:00   Tea and Coffee
      16:00-17:00   Rump Session (contd.)
      17:00-17:30   Wrap-up

What is EcoGrid? Eco Grid is an ubiquitous middleware in the SEEK infrastructure that combines features of a Data Grid for ecological data and a Service Grid for analysis and modeling services in SEEK. Eco Grid will form the underlying framework for data and service discovery, data and metadata sharing and access, and analytical service sharing and invocation for scientific workflow execution across the Grid. Specifically, the Eco Grid is being designed to provide seamless access to data and metadata stored at distributed Eco Grid nodes, based on a WSDL-based access mechanism but combining aspects of OGSA to provide asynchronous data access and data service presentation. Metadata served by the Eco Grid include systemic metadata as well as domain-specific metadata including extensible, ecologically relevant metadata based on the Ecological Metadata Language (EML) and ontologies and taxonomies. Eco Grid also enables storage of parameter ontologies used by scientific workflows to enable the execution of these pipelines in a distributed Compute Grid.