The Austrian Grid Initiative – High Level Extensions to Grid Middleware

Abstract

The Austrian Grid initiative is the national effort of Austria to establish a nation-wide grid environment for computational science and research. The goal of the Austrian Grid is to pursue a variety of scientific users in utilizing the Grid for their applications, e.g. medical sciencs, high-energy physics, applied numerical simulations, astrophyscial simulations and solar observations, as well as meteorology and geophysics. All these applications rely on a wide range of diverse computer science technologies, composed from standard grid middleware and sophisticated high-level extensions, which enable the implementation and operation of the Austrian Grid testbed and its applications.

One of these high-level middleware extensions is the Grid Visualization Kernel (GVK), which offers a means to process and transport large amounts of visualization data on the grid. In particular, GVK addresses the connection of grid applications and visualization clients on the grid. The visualization capabilities of GVK are provided as flexible grid services via dedicated interfaces and protocols, while GVK itself relies on the grid to implement and improve the functionality and the performance of the visualization pipeline. As a result, users are able to exploit visualization within their grid applications similar to how they would utilize visualization on their desktop workstations.