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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- GRIDS Lab/Gridbus's New Projects from 2007-2009 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 April 5, 2007 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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@csse.unimelb.edu.au URL: http://www.buyya.com | http://www.gridbus.org/~raj ------------------------------------------------------------------------