The North-East Regional e-Science Centre is
involved in a large number of research projects
that rely on the design and development of a
Grid-based infrastructure. Building a large
number of different infrastructures would be
time-consuming, difficult and risky; currently
available Grid middleware is relatively imma-
ture and subject to frequent change, while rel-
evant knowledge and experience among e-Sci-
ence researchers is understandably very lim-
ited. A further issue is that many e-Science
projects—both at Newcastle and elsewhere—
are currently based on Web Services, with the
intention of moving to Grid Services at some
point in the future. The method of making the
transition is not yet clear, nor is the extent of
the extra work, delays and risks this will intro-
duce into projects.
Consequently, it was decided to analyse the
requirements of all the Newcastle projects and
to design and build a common Core Grid
Middleware package that, in its initial release,
will incorporate four key Grid Services (Figure
1).
Following that initial release, the Core Grid
Middleware will continue to evolve by incorpo-
rating the “best-of-breed” OGSA Services pro-
duced by the Grid community or, if deemed
necessary, developing them in house.
The experience gained from the development
and deployment of the Core Grid Middleware
will be valuable for the UK e-Science commu-
nity wishing to adopt the Open Grid Services
Architecture; for any new Grid Services related
research projects; and as feedback to the proc-
ess of building the UK Grid Services-based in-
frastructure and the Open Middleware Infra-
structure Institute.
OGSA-DAI
Many of the research projects in which the
NEReSC is involved require access to database
management systems over the Grid. The Open
Grid Services Architecture – Database Access
and Integration (OGSA-DAI) service provides a
consistent way to access relational and XML
data on the Grid. The OGSA-DAI implementa-
tion is included as is in the Core Grid
Middleware.
OGSA-DAI DQP
NEReSC is directly involved in