Grid Services

This paper presents a Job Rotation management tool and the method in which the architecture of Grid/Web Services can compose a knowledge Grid to facilitate access to vocational training courses and in this way, provide an integrated solution for both employers and employment seekers. The Job Rotation tool is implemented as an on-line e-service that brings together training policies and employment policies. This tool not only assists businesses in finding employee training resources but it also helps them by filling in the positions of the employees who are being trained. The aforementioned positions are temporarily covered by people who are unemployed. All transactions take place automatically through the service. Without human intervention, the qualifications of the fill-ins are matched to the needs of the companies and several recorded criteria are considered before the final choice is made. It is a win-win strategy, where all parties involved (the unemployed who state their interest and the companies that accept to employ them) are benefited. The Grid /Web Services architecture provides up–to-date and verified information, directly from the offering organizations, reducing, in this way, administrative costs for the Job Rotation e-service.

Purpose of the research: After several years of growth, E-commerce has become mainstream and matured. However, the new challenges require that tomorrow's E-commerce system move beyond the basic functions such as a static website with electronic catalogue and/or a shopping cart towards an intelligent, dynamic, and secure commerce system. This research project attempts to explore the emerging technologies that can solve these issues such as systems integration and information sharing. Specifically, the nascent technologies introduced include application services, Web Services, grid computing and their combinations. The benefits and perils of each technology as well as the potential factors that influence businesses to adopt them are also discussed.

CSCL applications are complex distributed systems that pose special requirements towards achieving success in educational settings. Flexible and efficient design of collaborative activities by educators is a key precondition in order to provide CSCL tailorable systems, capable of adapting to the needs of each particular learning environment. Furthermore, some parts of those CSCL systems should be reused as often as possible in order to reduce development costs. In addition, it may be necessary to employ special hardware devices, computational resources that reside in other organizations, or even exceed the possibilities of one specific organization. Therefore, the proposal of this paper is twofold: collecting collaborative learning designs (scripting) provided by educators, based on well-known best practices (collaborative learning flow patterns) in a standard way (IMS-LD) in order to guide the tailoring of CSCL systems by selecting and integrating reusable CSCL software units; and, implementing those units in the form of grid services offered by third party providers. More specifically, this paper outlines a grid-based CSCL system having these features and illustrates its potential scope and applicability by means of a sample collaborative learning scenario.

CSCL applications are complex distributed systems that pose special requirements towards achieving success in educational settings. Flexible and efficient design of collaborative activities by educators is a key precondition in order to provide CSCL tailorable systems, capable of adapting to the needs of each particular learning environment. Furthermore, some parts of those CSCL systems should be reused as often as possible in order to reduce development costs. In addition, it may be necessary to employ special hardware devices, computational resources that reside in other organizations, or even exceed the possibilities of one specific organization. Therefore, the proposal of this paper is twofold: collecting collaborative learning designs (scripting) provided by educators, based on well-known best practices (collaborative learning flow patterns) in a standard way (IMS-LD) in order to guide the tailoring of CSCL systems by selecting and integrating reusable CSCL software units; and, implementing those units in the form of grid services offered by third party providers. More specifically, this paper outlines a grid-based CSCL system having these features and illustrates its potential scope and applicability by means of a sample collaborative learning scenario.

This article proposes both an agent representation and an agent communication model based on a social approach. By modelling Grid services with agents we are confident to be able to realise the interactive, dynamic generation of services that is necessary in order to have learning effects on interlocutors. The approach consists of integrating features from agent communication, language interpretation and e-learning/human-learning into a unique, original and simple view that privileges interactions, yet including control. The model is based on STROBE and proposes to enrich the languages of agents (Environment + Interpreter) by allowing agents to dynamically modify them -at run time -not only at the Data or Control level, but also at the Interpreter level (meta-level). The model is inscribed within a global approach, defending a shift from the classical algorithmic (control based) view to problem solving in computing to an interaction-based view of Social Informatics, where artificial as well as human agents operate by communicating as well as by computing. The paper shows how the model may not only account for the classical communication agent approaches, but also represent a fundamental advance in modelling societies of agents in particular in dynamic service generation scenarios such as those necessary today on the Web and proposed tomorrow on the Grid. Preliminary concrete experimentations illustrate the potential of the model; they are significant examples for a very wide class of computational and learning situations.

Traditionally, monitoring solutions are based on collecting a reduced set of external metrics about the system such as performance, memory consumption or response time. However, these tools are limited to detecting and diagnosing failures or errors in complex systems like application servers and grid services. New applications have embedded monitoring logic merged with business logic to better monitor and trace applications. This approach creates dependence between the "real" code and the monitoring code though, reducing the monitoring approach flexibility. Furthermore, both approaches (external or embedded monitoring) are not adaptable; they cannot change monitoring process level or precision at runtime. In this paper, we present a fine-grain monitoring framework architecture based on aspect-oriented technology. Aspect Oriented Programming offers the possibility to inject monitoring code dynamically, and even activate or deactivate monitoring code at runtime, allowing the collecting of metrics at the appropriate granularity (i.e. application level or method calls level).

Next generation applications and architectures (for example, Grids) are driving radical changes in the nature of traffic, service models, technology, and cost, creating opportunities for an advanced communications infrastructure to tackle next generation data services. To take advantage of these trends and opportunities, research communities are creating new architectures, such as the Open Grid Service Architecture (OGSA), which are being implemented in new prototype advanced infrastructures. The DWDM-RAM project, funded by DARPA, is actively addressing the challenges of next generation applications. DWDM-RAM is an architecture for data-intensive services enabled by next generation dynamic optical networks. It develops and demonstrates a novel architecture for new data communication services, within the OGSA context, that allows for managing extremely large sets of distributed data. Novel features move network services beyond notions of the network as a managed resource, for example, by including capabilities for dynamic on-demand provisioning and advance scheduling. DWDM-RAM encapsulates optical network resources (Lambdas, lightpaths) into a Grid Service and integrates their management within the Open Grid Service Architecture. Migration to emerging standards such as WS-Resource Framework (WS-RF) should be staright forward.