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Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference: GR/S68804/01
Title: GSIB: An Integrated Portal for Grid Service Creation, Deployment & Management
Principal Investigator: Walker, Dr C
Other Investigators:
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Project Partners:
Department: Computer Science
Organisation: Cardiff University
Scheme: First Grant Scheme Pre-FEC
Starts: 19 July 2004 Ends: 18 July 2007 Value (£): 127,492
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:
eScience Software Engineering
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:
Information Technologies
Related Grants:
Panel History:  
Summary on Grant Application Form
The middleware for Grid computing is becoming standardised based on Web service technologies. The Open Grid Services Infrastructure (OGSI) working group has proposed the use of Grid services which are Web services with extensions such as information and notification ports. These Grid services will be used as the basic building blocks of all future Grid applications and of a substantial part of the Grid middleware. Although a lot of effort has gone into developing the mid and lower tiers of the Grid infrastructure, relatively little work has been done on the upper tier infrastructure which provides both service clients and service providers with service-oriented interfaces and tools. Therefore, the proposed research will investigate and develop prototype software for service deployment, monitoring, and lifecycle management. A Visual Service Composition Environment (VSCE) will be developed that will support the graphical composition of services to create workflows. These workflows can then be deployed either as higher-level services, or as service-composite applications. VSCE will support service discovery and querying through interaction with service repositories such as UDDI. The proposed work will also investigate the deployment of legacy application software, in languages such as C, C++, and Fortran, as Grid services. This will be based on extensions to existing wrapper tools developed by the proposer that will support the publication of wrapped software to service repositories and the automatic generation of metadata describing the service interfaces and capabilities. When a service is modified, updated, or removed from use those workflows containing the service will be affected. An important aspect in the lifecycle management of services is to minimise the impact of such changes. To this end, the proposed research will investigate the use of a subscription-based notification service to propagate information about changes in service availability and interfaces to users. The proposed work will also investigate an execution environment for running service-composite applications. This workflow engine will take the workflow output by VSCE, in the form of an XML-based workflow description document, and convert it into an executable distributed program that dynamically discovers the services in the workflow, invokes them, mediates their interaction, and returns results to the submission environment. The final aspect of the proposed work is to monitor applications as they run so a user can check on progress and examine where the services in their application are actually executing.
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Organisation Website: http://www.cf.ac.uk