Dear All:

I would like to share some updates on Grid computing area and new
activities initiated within GRIDS Lab/Gridbus Project at Melbourne.

1. In the recent past, world-wide several efforts have been initiated
to enhance grid computing with capabilities that support Quality of
Services, service level agreements (SLA), utility-oriented allocation of
Grid resources to SLA dynamically. Even European Union has put together
a report on "Service-Oriented Knowledge Utility (SOKU): Vision and
Research Directions 2010 and Beyond" clearly signaling their intension
to support research around it as these are fundamental for wide-scale
adoption of Grid computing in enterprise applications.

2. Fortunately, this area has been key focus on our Gridbus Project
since its initiation in 2002. I happen to present a keynote talk at 14th
International Conference on Advanced Computing and Communications in
which I have shared key outcomes of Gridbus project. The title of my
talk was "Gridbus Middleware for Utility Grids: Building Autonomic and
Market-Oriented Global Grids for Delivering IT Services as the 5th
Utility". Those of you who have not attended this conference, you may
may want to walk through my slides:
http://www.gridbus.org/talks/Gridbus-ADCOM2006-Keynote.ppt

3. Gridbus Project is going to continue push heavily in this space as we
have secured funds for Australian Research Council (ARC) and Australian
Department of Science, Education and Training (DEST). Details on these
two projects are included below.
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GRIDS Lab/Gridbus's New Projects from 2007-2009
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Discovery Project: funded by Australian Research Council

Project Title:

QoS-based Scheduling of e-Research Application Workflows on Global Grids

Project Summary:
The emerging e-Research paradigm enables researchers from different
disciplines and organisations to engage in collaborative scientific
investigation. They need to share geographically distributed resources
owned by different organisations. e-Research applications need to
negotiate with resource providers for guarantees on access time,
duration and level of quality of service (QoS). To meet these
requirements, this project aims to develop technologies that support (a)
QoS-based scheduling of e-Research application workflows on distributed
resources, (b) mechanisms for negotiating service level agreements (SLA)
with resource providers, and (c) a system that supports SLA-based
allocation and management of resources.

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International Science Linkage Project: funded by Australian Department
of Science, Education and Training

Project Title:
The Utility Grid Project: Autonomic and Utility-Oriented Global Grids
for Powering Emerging e-Research Applications.

Project Summary:
Grid computing is emerging as an enabler for the creation of global
Cyberinfrastructure for e-Research applications and is recognised as one
of the top five emerging technologies that will have a major impact on
the quality of science and society over the next 20 years. This project
will link Australian researchers with international researchers through
two EU FP6 projects: CoreGrid and CatNets. The project is aimed at
enhancing the scope and depth of Australian R&D in Grid computing and
e-Research; establishing linkages to enable the leveraging of the
capabilities and resources of both Australian and international
partners; and developing grid technologies that improve agility and
utility of national and international Cyberinfrastructure powering
e-Research applications.
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BTW, if you are still wondering about "e-Research" word, it is an
Australian term for "e-Science" or Grid applications.

4. In addition to the above two projects, GRIDS Lab has has expanded its
research areas such as (a) Content Delivery Networks (CDN) and (2)
InterGrid - Overlay Networks for Peering between Islands of Grids.
Please check out our websites for:
CDN: http://www.gridbus.org/cdn/
InterGrid: http://www.gridbus.org/intergrid/
These are large initiatives and should present significant opportunity
for creating new collaborative projects with international colleagues.

If any of you are interested in exploring these topics or have already
been exploring and wants to collaborate with us, please let me know.

Happy Easter!

Cheers
Raj
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Dr. Rajkumar Buyya
Associate Professor and Reader
Grid Computing and Distributed Systems (GRIDS) Lab
Dept. of Computer Science and Software Engineering
The University of Melbourne
ICT Building, 111, Barry Street, Carlton
Melbourne, VIC 3053, Australia
Phone: +61-3-8344 1344 (office); +61-0431385688 (home)
Fax: +61-3-9348 1184; Email: raj@...
URL: http://www.buyya.com | http://www.gridbus.org/~raj
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