Speaker
Describe the added value of the Grid for the scientific/technical activity you (plan to) do on the Grid. This should include the scale of the activity and of the potential user community and the relevance for other scientific or business applications
The GRelC DAS: (i) could attract new communities that usually work intensively
with databases (e.g. financial applications exploiting datawarehouse and data
mining); (ii) help existing ones (bioinformatics, astrophysics, etc.), in performing
new tests and experiments; and (iii) improve e-Science research results. Due to
the transversal role of this service, many experiments and Virtual Organizations
within the EGEE project would benefit from it. Within such a multifaceted
environment new kinds of queries could also be invented to perform distributed
computation based on a work sharing approach.
Moreover, replication (cross-DBMS) facilities that we developed within our
service could help grid users and site admins to ease (i) deployment of data
sources, (ii) data migration and (iii) database backup.
With a forward look to future evolution, discuss the issues you have encountered (or that you expect) in using the EGEE infrastructure. Wherever possible, point out the experience limitations (both in terms of existing services or missing functionality)
Several EGEE-VOs need access to relational DBs for their experiments. Even
though in the last few years many efforts have been concentrated in this
direction, performances have not been completely addressed. Within the EGEE
middleware there is a lack of services concerning this topic and current
solutions do not fully address user’s/VO’s requirements. The GRelC DAS tries to
bridge this gap providing a well suited solution strongly integrated with the
existing gLite components.
Describe the scientific/technical community and the scientific/technical activity using (planning to use) the EGEE infrastructure. A high-level description is needed (neither a detailed specialist report nor a list of references).
The activity aims at integrating within the EGEE infrastructure the GRelC DAS, a
GSI enabled web service allowing high performance access in grid
environments both to relational and non-relational DBs.This service currently
runs on the GILDA t-Infrastructure and fully interacts with several gLite
services.The target community includes scientists belonging to different
domains within the EGEE collaboration that need for their applications to
transparently and securely access huge distributed DBs.
Report on the experience (or the proposed activity). It would be very important to mention key services which are essential for the success of your activity on the EGEE infrastructure.
We present the GRelC DAS, a data grid access service developed by the GRelC
Team (SPACI Consortium and Univ. of Salento).Deployment and experimental
results related to the GILDA test-bed as well as porting issues on gLite
middleware will also be presented.The GRelC DAS is a GSI enabled web service
addressing extreme performance, interoperability and security.It provides an
uniform access interface to relational and non-relational data sources. The
GRelC DAS supports both basic and advanced functionalities. The aim of this
service is to efficiently, securely and transparently manage databases on the
grid across VOs, with regard to emerging and consolidating grid standards and
specifications and interoperation with gLite. We will detail the key components
of the GRelC DAS architecture, presenting queries (with advanced
functionalities such as chunking and compression),user management,
technological choices, heterogeneous DB access and security issues (GSI
support, VOMS integration, etc).
