OMII-UK

Web Page: http://www.omii.ac.uk/wiki/GoogleSummerOfCode#section-GoogleSummerOfCode-2009ProjectIdeas

Mailing List: discuss@omii.ac.uk - discussion of software, announce@omii.ac.uk - announcement list. Each piece of software typically has its own mailing list as well.

OMII-UK cultivates, develops and supports a wide range of open source software aimed at the UK research community but available for anyone to use. OMII-UK software spans a wide range such as data access, integration and sharing (OGSA-DAI), workflow enactment and tools (Taverna), video conferencing and collaboration (PAG, RAT and VIC), and computational job execution (GridSAM, RAPID) and APIs (SAGA) enabling better use and sharing of resources across organisational boundaries to turn ideas into knowledge and promote collaborations between organisations and individuals. OMII-UK has a user-focused approach, encouraging the developments of communities that use OMII-UK software components together with other components in novel ways to enable world class research.

Projects

• Adaptive Cost Estimation Techniques for OGSA-DAI DQP The OGSA-DAI DQP product, currently in development, is a distributed query processor based on the OGSA-DAI technology. It is going to extend the functionality of the existing OGSA-DQP system and aims to provide a flexible framework for data integration and research in distributed query processing. Implementation of methods that would allow monitoring of query execution and adaptive cost estimation is the focus of this project.
• Advanced Data Management Capabilities Using MapReduce The current MapReduce implementation of OMII-SAGA does not take advantage of some optimization possibilities such as support for combiner functions, consideration of data locality for mappers, serialization and compression of intermediate data, for example. The aim of this project is to enhance SAGA-MapReduce so that it will be more effective and competitive in solving real-world scientific problems.
• Generating Customized User Interfaces to the Cloud focusing on the requirement of the end-user The project idea represents an added functionality of performing jobs on cloud compute resources to the project 'Rapid' of OMII-UK. Rapid is a unique way of quickly designing and delivering web portal interfaces to domain-specific applications that require computational resources, such as utility/high-performance computing infrastructures. The project goal is to adapt Rapid to generate intuitive interfaces that submits jobs to cloud infrastructures using Open Source Cloud solutions.
• Improvements to the JDBC driver for OGSA-DAI OGSA-DAI is a well know middleware that has the objective of exposing and integrating databases in the grid offering a client API for accessing the exposed databases. It was developed an JDBC Driver for OGSA-DAI aiming to bring legacy applications to the grid and also provides Java developers with a well know method to access relational databases in the grid. This project aim to add new features to the actual version of the JDBC Driver for OGSA-DAI delivering at the end of GSoC the version 0.2.
• Managing Applications across Clouds The project goal for the proposal “Managing Applications across Clouds” is to extend the interoperability of the SAGA framework by adding support for the “Sector and Sphere” computing model in order for applications to be able to exploit the Open Cloud consortium test bed. This requires coding a new adapter for SAGA that allows the SAGA API to be able to submit jobs to Sector and Sphere cloud computing platform, perform filesystem calls etc.