T.O.H White

New tools to support collaboration and virtual organizations

We describe the use of new eScience tools to support collaboration, including the use of XML data representations to support shared viewing of the information content of data, metadata tools for documenting data and Web 2.0 social networking tools for documenting ideas and the collaboration process. This latter work has led to the development of the http://SciSpace.net Web resource.

Lessons in scientific data interoperability: XML and the eMinerals project.

A collaborative environmental eScience project produces a broad range of data, notable as much for its diversity, in source and format, as its quantity. We find that extensible markup language (XML) and associated technologies are invaluable in managing this deluge of data. We describe FoX, a toolkit for allowing Fortran codes to read and write XML, thus allowing existing scientific tools to be easily re-used in an XML-centric workflow.

Integrating computing, data and collaboration grids: the RMCS tool

We describe RMCS as one of the first tools for grid computing that integrates data and metadata management into a single job submission system. The system is easy to use, with client tools that are easy to install. Although the RMCS system was developed as a prototype, it is now in production use and a number of scientific studies have been completed using it.

eScience for molecular-scale simulations and the eMinerals project

We review the work carried out within the eMinerals project to develop eScience solutions that facilitate a new generation of molecular-scale simulation work. Technological developments include integration of compute and data systems, developing of collaborative frameworks and new researcher-friendly tools for grid job submission, XML data representation, information delivery, metadata harvesting and metadata management. A number of diverse science applications will illustrate how these tools are being used for large parameter-sweep studies, an emerging type of study for which the integration of computing, data and collaboration is essential.

Computational Grids for Mid-Sized Collaborative Projects: The eMinerals Experience

Grid computing has the potential to revolutionise how small groups of simulation scientists work together to tackle new science problems. In this paper we report how the eMinerals project has developed a small scale integrated compute and data grid infrastructure - the eMinerals minigrid - and developed generic job submission tools that exploit this infrastructure and which enable the science users to also access other grid systems.