In this page, we have stated some of the our research interests. All the research topics described here are related to the grid technology. The work presented here is part of the Virtual Laboratory project (VLAM-G) funded by the ICESKIS II research program. The VLAM-G project aims at developing a platform allowing scientists working at geographically distributed sites to use all the resources (hardware and software) available at all sites to perform their experiments. This project involves different topics described in more detail on the VLAM Home Page .
NOTE: The access to the Technical Reports is for now limited to VLAM-G partners. When we get the green light the access restriction will be removed. If you want to know more about the VLAM-G project or the research activity on the Grid, sent an e-mail to a.s.z.belloum@uva.nl
The grid technology is an emerging technology, it aims at providing services to ease the construction of distributed systems involving heterogeneous components, located at different organizations and using various security infrastructure. At the heart of this technology stands a challenging problem related to the modeling of information contained in the sets of data considered in grid-applications. So far, an extensive work has been done to provide grid-users with services allowing them to represent and manipulate files containing raw data. However, this does not seem to fulfill the requirements of a number of grid-application. The concept of the data-grid introduced to deal with the data-manipulation on the grid has to be extended. It is the goal of VLAM-G project to study the methods and techniques needed to support the representation of the information contained in the data sets. In the first phase of this project an extensive study of the state of art of the data-grid has to be done [1]. Depending on the result of this study, we have to decide if the technology currently used in the grid-technology is powerful enough to support the representation of data. In the second phase a model for representing a information on the grid has to proposed and the necessary tools to integrate this model within the grid-technology have to be developed. Our work will be based on Globus toolkit, which is becoming the de facto standard in the field of distributed computing (Grid computing) [2].
The grid technology offers the possibility to use geographically distributed hardware and software resources as if they were part of your local systems. For the scientific community, grid technology offers the computation power needed to perform very intensive CPU applications. Nowadays, a number of research institution all over the world are collaborating these challenging scientific problems. If the grid technology allows the research institution to use one another computation facility; it does not ease in any way the collaboration of work of these institutions. Within the VLAM-G project, we aim at coupling the grid-technology with research work that has been done in the area of collaborative systems. The VLAM-G project targets a wide range of end-users within the scientific community, the collaboration mechanisms needed for a certain experiment in a specific scientific domain may be completely different form any other ones. It thus important to select the appropriate collaboration mechanism for each of the experiment considered in the VLAM-G project.
The development of the VLAM-G collaborative system has to be integrated within the VLAM-G grid. A certain amount of interactions is thus needed with the grid components, such interaction has to be thought carefully since it brings together the two technologies we are interested in namely: the grid and the collaborative systems.
The interaction of the end-users with the grid technology is an interesting topic to investigate. If for computer scientists it is easy to interact with the grid via the command line interface, the later is far from being obvious and strait forward to a large number of computer users. It is likely that an interface based on graphics will be more appropriate. The VLAM-G front-end module has to combine commodity technologies that promote ease of use and reuse if code in desktop environment with the grid technology that emphasize effective operation in large scale, multi-institutional, wide area environment. The VLAM-G front-end aims at bringing together two different worlds, the world of scalability and high performance computing and the world of desktop presentation and interaction.
The Technical reports listed below tackle different topics investigated in the VLAM-G project. They reflect the main components of the VLAM-G-AM namely: the Run Time system (TN01), the VLAM-G Collaborative System (TN02), the VLAM-G-AM Front End (TN03), and the VLAM-G data handling system (TN04). These reports can be read in any order for someone who knows a bit about the VLAM-G Abstract Machine, otherwise it is suggested to the reader to start by the TN03 which describes the VLAM-G-AM Front-End, the latter describes not only how the VLAM-G end-users will interact with the system, but it shows also the interaction between the main components of the VLAM-G-AM.
H. Afsarmanesh, R. Belleman, A. S. Z. Belloum, A. Benabdelkader,
J. F. J. van den Brand, T. M. Breit, H. Bussemaker, G. B. Eijkel,
A. Frenkel, C. Garita,
D. L. Groep, A. W. van Halderen,
R. M. A. Heeren, Z. W. Hendrikse, J. Kaandorp, E. C. Kaletas, V. Klos,
P. Sloot, R. D. Vis, A. Visser, H. H. Yakali,
"VLAM-G: A Grid Based Virtual Laboratory"
Submitted to the Special Issue on Grid Computing
(Scientific Programming Journal)
A. Belloum, Z. Hendrikse, D. Groep, E. Kaletas, A.W. van Halderen,
H. Afsarmanesh, and L.O. Hertzberger
"The VLAM-G Abstract Machine: a Data and process Handling System on
the Grid"
In the proceedings of the HPCN2001 conference
A. Belloum and D. Groep E. Kaletas, Z. Hendrikse, A.W. Van Halderen,
H. Afsarmanesh, and L.O. Hertzberger "The VLAM-G Abstract Machine"
first Grid Forum, 4 - 9 March 2001, Amsterdam.
Slides of the presentation
A. Belloum and D. Groep E. Kaletas, Z. Hendrikse, A.W. Van Halderen,
H. Afsarmanesh, and L.O. Hertzberger "The VLAM-G project"
ICT-Kenniscongres, 6 - 7 September 2001, Den Haag, The Netherlands.
Poster
Finally the VLAM-G logo (by Anthony Van Inge)
If someone want to volunteer for continuing this art work his is more than welcome.
For comments send an e-mail to adam