GRIDS, Databases and Information Systems Engineering Research

Speaker: Keith Jeffery

8th February 2006 , 1pm , Devonshire G21/G22 Conference Room

Abstract

GRID technology, emerging in the late nineties, has evolved from a metacomputing architecture towards a pervasive computation and information utility. However, the architectural developments echo strongly the computational origins and information systems engineering aspects have received scant attention. The development within the GRID community of the W3C-inspired OGSA indicates a willingness to move in a direction more suited to the wider end user requirements. In particular the OGSA/DAI initiative provides a web-services level interface to databases. In contrast to this stream of development, early architectural ideas for a more general GRIDs environment articulated in UK in 1999 have recently been more widely accepted, modified, evolved and enhanced by a group of experts working under the auspices of the new EC DGINFSO F2 (GRIDs) Unit. The resulting reports on ‘Next Generation GRIDs’ have been published with the third due in January 2006. They are used by the EC as an adjunct to the Framework Call for Proposals Documentation. The reports proposes the need for a wealth of research in all aspects of information systems engineering, within which the topics of advanced distributed parallel multimedia heterogeneous database systems with greater representativity and expressivity have some prominence. The need for novel operating systems and a new architecture for middleware based on SOKUs (service oriented knowledge utilities) has been articulated. Topics such as metadata, security, trust, persistence, performance, scalability are all included. This represents a huge opportunity for the database and information systems engineering community, particularly in Europe.