DIALOGUE workshop participants.
Image Courtesy Alexandre Vaniachine |
More than 30 data grid researchers from 13 institutions in the United States, Europe and Asia attended the First International DIALOGUE Workshop, where they shared research findings and worked to enable global data access and integration across scientific grids.
"As more and more applications move towards distributed storage and processing solutions, new and interesting issues arise," said workshop organizer Joel Saltz from The Ohio State University. "Applications must handle varying, sometimes extremely large data sizes and increasingly complex data models. Areas from engineering to biomedical research face common challenges and domain specific issues regarding the storage, management and processing of requirements in a data grid environment. Future data grid middleware solutions will need to be able to deal with these issues in generalizable, globally applicable ways."
The workshop was held August 1–2 at the OSU campus in Columbus, Ohio. DIALOGUE represents a major international effort to push data access and integration (DAI) tools and standards into new territory, envisioning more ambitious data integration architectures that are well-adapted for semantic grids, simulation, analysis, data mining and visualization. The DIALOGUE goal is to bring together researchers and developers to create a framework that is readily available to scientists and scientific organizations worldwide.
"As grid computing technologies mature, more research is focusing on database and grid integration," said Alexandre Vaniachine from Argonne National Laboratory. "New technologies are bridging the gap between data accessibility and the increasing power of grid computing. The workshop identified approaches for further improvements of the OGSA-DAI framework that is used for database and grid integration by many scientific disciplines."
The UK OGSA-DAI project constructs middleware that allows researchers to use the grid to access and integrate data from separate, heterogeneous sources. DIALOGUE builds on OGSA-DAI's success and engages other major DAI projects such as the OSU biomedical grid projects DataCutter, STORM, and Mobius. Other projects, applications and frameworks from universities, computer science and industry contribute to the DIALOGUE effort.
Learn more at the DIALOGUE Workshop and OGSA-DAI Web sites.
—Alexandre Vaniachine, Argonne National Laboratory
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