Integrated Grid Infrastructure

A Grid infrastructure is a distributed system building on Web Services that supports management and security of long-lived, resource-intensive activities, which may require the combined resources of multiple service providers, and may involve sharing of these resources between users from different organisations. The Grid and Web Services brands have now converged under the banner of service oriented architectures and infrastructures. Grids of this nature can be found in sectors such as engineering, finance, life sciences, media production and healthcare, and may involve a wide range of assets such as data sources, storage, applications and processing.

Goals and Achievements

SIMDAT’s objective was to drive the adoption of Grid technology for industrial product design. SIMDAT achievements include:

loosely coupled service-oriented architecture supporting management and security of a wide range of application services
SLA (Service Level Agreement) management service that allows business partners to trade resources under the terms of bi-lateral SLAs
B2B registry supporting contextualised and secure discovery
standardised job submission service that can be managed by SLAs and supports the integration of heterogeneous resource management systems
industrial Grid Profile analysing how key Web Service and Grid interoperability specifications can be adopted by industry

Role in SIMDAT

SIMDAT’s Grid infrastructure is based on GRIA, a secure middleware designed to support B2B collaborations through service provision across organisational boundaries. GRIA has now been adopted by the automotive, aerospace and pharmaceutical application sectors. The prototypes in each sector continue to exploit the advanced security and manage delivered by SIMDAT. A summary of the prototypes is given in below:

Aerospace (BAE/EADS/CEDG/MSC/LMS): pan-European inter-enterprise multidisciplinary (optimisation, aeroacoustics, aerodynamics, structures, RSM) collaborative configuration design of a low-noise, high-lift landing system
Automotive (Audi/MSC/LMS/Ontoprise): Inter-domain data integration between CAD, CAE and CAT teams
Automotive (Renault/ESI/IDEStyle): Crash Compatibility Testing for collaborative car design supporting confidentiality constraints of components between organisations
Automotive Knowledge (Audi/Fraunhofer SCAI/InforSense): Distributed data mining using WEKA toolkit
Pharma B2B (GSK/Galapogas/NEC/InforSense): B2B Bioinformatics collaborations
Pharma Federated Prototype (ULB/Fraunhofer SCAI/NEC/UKA/InforSense/EMBL): ixodus workflow with P2P data distribution

The results of this technology can be found under Grid Solution Portfolio at Core, Service Management, Execution Management and Information.