GridCoord DoW

Key projects

A large number of projects have been funded within the UK (see D.3.1.1). Two examples of these projects are:

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  DAIT - Data Access & Integration Two
  
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  GeneGrid - a Grid Based Virtual Bioinformatics Laboratory
  

The DAIT project is the second stage of the Open Grid Services Architecture – Data Access and Integration Services (OGSA-DAI) a £3.4M project which ended in Oct 2003. It was a collaborative project involving: Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC) (University of Edinburgh), IBM, National e-Science Centre, North East Regional e-Science Centre, North West Regional e-Science Centre, and Oracle Corporation UK. OGSA-DAI goal was to develop a leading position in the design and development of Grid Services, compliant with the Open Grid Services Architecture, that enable Database Access and Integration (OGSA-DAI). Products take four forms:

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  An established framework for Grid Database Services and Grid Database Management Services
  
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  Useful and composable examples of Grid Database Services and Grid Database Management Services as generic middleware that can be deployed in a large number of grid-based projects
  
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  Improvements in the design of OGSA standards and reference implementations of the corresponding generic middleware
  
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  Papers and tutorials on the design and use of the OGSA-DAI products.
  

This requirement for database access and integration is central to a large proportion of e-Science applications and to e-Business. Many advances in science, engineering and decision making depend on making better use of growing volumes of data in diverse and dispersed repositories. Many of these are independently managed and curated.

DAIT was funded by EPSRC (£1.2M) after OGSA-DAI finished and its end-date is September 2005. DAIT is concerned with constructing middleware to assist with access and integration of data from separate data sources via the grid. It is engaged in identifying the requirements, designing solutions and delivering software that will meet this purpose. The project was conceived by the UK Database Task Force and is working closely with the Global Grid Forum DAIS-WG and the Globus team.

GeneGrid is a £0.4M collaboration project involving Amtec Medical, Belfast e-Science Centre, Fusion Antibodies Ltd, and Queen's University Belfast.

The GeneGrid project proposes to exploit grid technology, existing microarray and sequencing technology and the large volumes of data generated through screening services, to develop specialist tissue specific datasets relevant to the particular disease type being studied. The advantage is that all the genes that relate to a disease can be studied in silico. It will enable this by creating a grid-based framework that will integrate the generation and analysis of cancer and infectious disease specific genetic information from various distributed international sources, public domain data sets and other unique data generated by e-Science projects. This information can then be made available to other third parties in a secure and reliable manner for commercial exploitation. The project will incorporate a protein prediction component for further analysis against publicly available databases using data mining techniques. The proteins predicted can be screened to establish surface markers of importance, which can then be used as antibody targets.

Also there are a number of pilot projects (see D.3.1.1), including:

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  MYGRID: Directly Supporting the E-Scientist. (Grant value: £3.5M, Funding body: EPSRC, Start date: 2001). It is concerned with designing, developing and demonstrating higher level functionalities over an existing grid infrastructure that support scientists in making use of complex distributed resources. The project will develop an e-Scientist's workbench that supports: (i) the scientific process of experimental investigation, evidence accumulation and result assimilation; (ii) the scientist's use of the community's information; and (iii) scientific collaboration, allowing dynamic groupings to tackle emergent research problems.
  
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  DAME: Distributed Aircraft Maintenance Environment. (Grant value: £3.1M, Funding body: EPSRC, Start date: 2002). This project aimed to build a grid test-bed for distributed diagnostics. The application demonstrator was a distributed aircraft maintenance environment motivated by the needs of Rolls Royce and its information system partner Data Systems and Solutions. The test bed built on the emerging grid standards and technologies, and addressed performance issues such as large-scale data management with real time demands.
  
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  GridPP: The Grid for UK Particle Physics. (Grant value: £17M, Funding body: PPARC, Start date: 2001). GridPP will deliver the grid middleware and hardware infrastructure to enable testing of a prototype of the grid for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project at CERN of significant scale. The GridPP project is designed to integrate with the existing Particle Physics programme within the UK, thus enabling early deployment and full testing of grid technology and efficient use of limited resources. The project will disseminate GridPP deliverables in the multi-disciplinary e-Science environment and will seek to build collaborations with emerging grid activities both nationally and internationally.
  
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  AstroGrid.(Grant value: £7.4M, Funding body: PPARC, EU, Start date: 2001). The AstroGrid project aims at producing a working datagrid for key selected databases, with associated data mining facilities. It is part of the world-wide drive towards the concept of a Virtual Observatory (VO), and can be seen as the UK contribution to this vision. However in various ways it is both wider and more focussed than other initiatives. It is wider in that it covers astronomy, solar physics, and space plasma (solar terrestrial) physics, and covers all wavelengths from radio to X-ray.
  
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  RealityGrid - a tool for investigating condensed matter and materials. (Grant value: £3.5M, Funding body: EPSRC, Start date: 2002). The project plan is to construct a grid test-bed to enable the realistic modelling of complex condensed matter systems at the molecular and mesocale levels, and for the discovery of new materials.
  

In addition, there are a number of pure research projects such as CancerGrid. CancerGRID is a 3-year project (£2.3M) funded by the Medical Research Council MRC (http://www.cancergrid.org/). The aim is to develop open standards and information management systems for clinical cancer informatics. A team of 12 dedicated staff based at 5 universities - Cambridge, Oxford, UCL, Belfast, and Birmingham - will be working with experts in information science and cancer research. CancerGrid will deliver modular, distributed software solutions for the key problems of clinical cancer informatics: clinical trial patient entry, randomisation and follow-up; storage and analysis of complex datasets; linking trial and epidemiology data with profiling information. It will facilitate trials management and future collaboration across international boundaries.