The grid: blueprint for a new computing infrastructure
The grid: blueprint for a new computing infrastructure
A Model for Heterogeneous Distributed Database Systems
BNCOD 12 Proceedings of the 12th British National Conference on Databases: Directions in Databases
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During 1999 the UK Office of Science and Technology wished to find a paradigm for future scientific R&D IT support. The author was asked to produce a paper and did so, proposing a 3-layer GRIDs architecture. At about the same time, Ian Foster and Carl Kesselman published 'The GRID' - commonly known as the 'GRID Bible' which proposed a network of linked supercomputer centres.The 3-layer architecture proposed in UK has at the base the computation/ data layer which corresponds with that of Foster & Kesselman but extendsit to include detectors and instrumentss uch astho se on particle physics accelerators or on satellites. The middle information layer provides to the end-user (or other IT systems) a homogeneous view over heterogeneous data, including analytical (statistical) software and modelling and simulation facilities. The highest, knowledge, layer stores 'commonly accepted justified belief' i. e. scientific papers including hypotheses created by people -with hyperlinks to information and software systems used to allow replication of the experiments - and the results of data mining which is essentially automated hypothesis creation. The knowledge is also used in intelligent detectors in the lowest layer to improve the relevance of collected data, and in query/answer assist software in the middle information layer. An architectural implementation based on metadata, intelligent agents and brokers (i. e. services) was proposed.Within UK the e-Science R&D programme since April 2001 has implemented the Foster & Kesselman software. The limitations are now known to be asp redicted in 1999 and a further R&D programme aimed lessat metacomputing and more at e-business, e-information and e-learning is proposed. Meantime, the Global Grid Forum has proposed (late 2001) an Open Grid Services Architecture, based on W3C Web Services, so finally realising the convergence implicit in the 3-layer GRIDs model.