Building a biodiversity GRID

  • Authors:

  • Andrew C. Jones;Richard J. White;W. Alex Gray;Frank A. Bisby;Neil Caithness;Nick Pittas;Xuebiao Xu;Tim Sutton;Nick J. Fiddian;Alastair Culham;Malcolm Scoble;Paul Williams;Oliver Bromley;Peter Brewer;Chris Yesson;Shonil Bhagwat

  • Affiliations:

  • School of Computer Science, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK;School of Computer Science, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK;School of Computer Science, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK;Centre for Plant Diversity & Systematics, School of Plant Sciences, The University of Reading, Reading, UK;Centre for Plant Diversity & Systematics, School of Plant Sciences, The University of Reading, Reading, UK;School of Computer Science, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK;School of Computer Science, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK;Centre for Plant Diversity & Systematics, School of Plant Sciences, The University of Reading, Reading, UK;School of Computer Science, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK;Centre for Plant Diversity & Systematics, School of Plant Sciences, The University of Reading, Reading, UK;Department of Entomology, The Natural History Museum, London, UK;Department of Entomology, The Natural History Museum, London, UK;School of Biological Sciences, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK;Centre for Plant Diversity & Systematics, School of Plant Sciences, The University of Reading, Reading, UK;Centre for Plant Diversity & Systematics, School of Plant Sciences, The University of Reading, Reading, UK;Department of Entomology, The Natural History Museum, London, UK

  • Venue:
  • LSGRID'04 Proceedings of the First international conference on Life Science Grid
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

In the BiodiversityWorld project we are building a GRID to support scientific biodiversity-related research. The requirements associated with such a GRID are somewhat different from other GRIDs, and this has influenced the architecture that we have developed. In this paper we outline these requirements, most notably the need to interoperate over a diverse set of legacy databases and applications in an environment that supports effective resource discovery and use of these resources in complex workflows. Our architecture provides an invocation model that is usable over a wide range of resource types and underlying GRID middleware. However, there is a trade-off between the flexibility provided by our architecture and its performance. We discuss how this affects the inclusion of computationally intensive applications and applications that are highly interactive; we also consider the broader issue of interoperation with other GRIDs.