GridCC

The "Grid enabled Remote Instrumentation with Distributed Control and Computation" (GRIDCC) is a project funded by the European Community, aimed to provide access to and control of distributed complex instrumentation.The goal of GRIDCC is to exploit grid opportunities for the secure and collaborative work of distributed teams, in order to remotely operate and monitor scientific equipment using the grid’s massive memory and computing resources for storing and processing data generated by this kind of equipment.

GRIDCC services

# Virtual Control Room (VCR): Provides a common set of collaboration tools and allows users to build complex workflows, which are then submitted to the Execution Services, and to directly monitor and control remote instruments in real-time.
# Compute Elements (CE) and Storage Elements (SE): Provide access to computing and storage resources, which are common place in Grid infrastructures.
# Execution Services (ES): They control the execution of the workflows defined by the user in the VCR, maintaining the status of the tasks that make up the workflow. Also, they support the advance reservation of resources. This information is passed to the user in the VCR upon request.
# Problem Solver (PS): Offers automated problem solving in a Grid environment at two levels. The first, local to a given Instrument Element, allows to solve problems related to functionalities of a given instrument. The second, which is global, allows to solve system-wide problems.
# Security Services (SS): GRIDCC uses a split security system. When interacting with components of other Grids the GSI security will be used and the users identified by their X.509 proxy certificate. When interacting with the IE the user will be identified by a Kerberos ticket.
# Information Service (IS): It stores information about resources and provides such information to the ES and VCR to discover available and appropriate resources.
# Monitoring Service (MS): This service uses a publish/subscribe system to disseminate monitoring data. Candidates include RGMA, [http://www.naradabrokering.org/ NaradaBrokering] , Sun Message Queue-JMS, Globus Toolkit 4.0 WSRF and IBM RMM-JMS.
# Instrument Element (IE): This is a unique concept to GRIDCC. It consists of a coherent collection of services which provide all the functionality to configure, partition and control the physical instrument. In other words we define the term ‘Instrument Element’ (IE) as a set of services that provides the needed interface and implementation that enables the remote control and monitoring of physical instruments. The IE needs to be really flexible; in the simplest scenario this abstraction can represent a simple geospatial sensor or an FPGA card that performs a specific function, while in a more complex network of sensors it can be used as a bridge between the sensors and the computational grid. Finally, the IE can be part of the device instrumentation, permitting the organisation of the instrument into a network that allows grid interaction.

Consortium

*Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Legnaro, Italy
*Brunel University, Uxbridge, United Kingdom
*International Business Machine (IBM), Haifa, Israel
*Imperial College of London, London, United Kingdom
*Greek Research and Technology Network S.A., Athens, Greece
* [http://www.iasa.gr/IASA_Index.html Institute of Accelerating Systems and Applications] , Athens, Greece
*Consorzio Nazionale Interuniversitario per le Telecomunicazioni, Italy
* [http://www.imaa.cnr.it/ Istituto di Metodologie per l’Analisi Ambientale] - CNR, Potenza, Italy
* [http://hcilab.uniud.it/ Human-Computer Interaction Lab] at Università degli Studi di Udine, Udine, Italy
* [http://www.elettra.trieste.it/ Sincrotrone Trieste S.C.P.A.] , Trieste, Italy

References

* Francesco Lelli, Eric Frizziero, Michele Gulmini, Gaetano Maron, Salvatore Orlando, Andrea Petrucci and Silvano Squizzato. "The many faces of the integration of instruments and the grid". International Journal of Web and Grid Services 2007 - Vol. 3, No.3 pp. 239 - 266 [http://www.inderscience.com/search/index.php?action=record&rec_id=14953&prevQuery=&ps=10&m=or Electronic Edition]
* Eric Frizziero, Michele Gulmini, Francesco Lelli, Gaetano Maron, Alexander Oh, Salvatore Orlando, Andrea Petrucci, Silvano Squizzato, Sergio Traldi. "Instrument Element: A New Grid component that Enables the Control of Remote Instrumentation". International Conference on Cluster Computing and Grid (CCGrid), Singapore May 2006. [http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/CCGRID.2006.146 Electronic Edition]
*K H Darby-Dowman, P R Hobson, C Huang, T Kalganova, P Kyberd, M R Irving, R J Taylor, R. Pugliese, F. Asnicar, L. Del Cano, L. Iviani, A. Busato, R. Borghes, C. Kotsokalis, P. Louridas, F. Karayannis, C. Stratis, A. Lenis, A. Moralis, K. Beros, M. Grammatikou, P. Kreuzer, P. Sphicas, J. Darlington, A. S. McGough, M. Krznaric, L. Dickens, D. Colling, J. Martyniak, A. Petrucci, F. Lelli, G. Maron, E. Frizziero, S. Traldi, S. Squizzato, M. Gulmini, T. Ferrari, A. Ghiselli, A. Oh, L. Chittaro, R. Ranon, L. De Marco, A. Senerchia. "GRIDCC-Bringing instrumentation (back) onto the Grid". International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics, (CHEP06) Mumbai, India, 13-17 February 2006. [http://www.gridpp.ac.uk/abstracts/chep06/gridcc.html Electronic Edition]

External links

* [http://www.gridcc.org GRIDCC Official Website]
* [http://www.gridtoday.com/grid/1086062.html GridCC in GRIDToday] . Gaetano Maron and Francesco Lelli presented the GRIDCC project in one of the leading online journals
* [http://www.gridcc.org/viewnote.php?id=1812 Video On-Line Demo] . A sample video that shows the GRIDCC service orchestration.
* [http://sadgw.lnl.infn.it:2002/MapsMonitor/ On-Line Demo] . A Peer to Peer Approach for the Geo-Location of a Grid of Instruments
* [http://www.eu-egee.org/ Eu-EGEE (Enabling Grids for E-sciencE) web site]