Abstract
As network performance has outpaced computational power and storage capacity, a new paradigm has evolved to enable the sharing and coordinated use of geographically distributed resources, popularly known as "Grid" computing. The aims are to couple distributed resources and offer consistent and inexpensive access to resources irrespective of their physical location. Grid computing provides scalable and secure remote access to computing, data, and other resources throughout the Internet. These technologies enable the clustering of a wide variety of geographically distributed resources, i.e., supercomputers, storage systems, data sources, and special devices and services, that can then be used as a unified resource.
Much of the focus of Grid until recently has been within research organizations. Currently the involvement of commercial organization has increased tremendously. That leads to a greater focus on integration with commercial computing models and more work on the security and resource management models required for automated and secure access negotiation for remote resources. In order to control such a broad base of resources, Grid Computing has a middleware layer controlling the distributed execution of applications. Under the initial approach based on dedicated resources or opportunistic resources, were basically related to constraints on budget and complexity. However by exploring the possibility of a wider range of applications specially based on data grids and content networks, a larger diversity of resources and devices can be thought participating in a grid system.
The first edition of the MGC workshop was held on June 2003, in conjunction with the Middleware Conference, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. MGC'2003 saw a good combination of the many different flavors in Middleware for Grid Computing, with 16 technical presentations and discussions on several stimulating topics including, among others, Classic Grids, object oriented technologies, Service-based Grids, Open grid Service Architecture, Agent Grid, Interactive Grid, Grid Economy / Scheduling, and Portlets. After the workshop, extended and thoroughly revised versions of the papers were invited to a Special Issue of Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience Journal published in 2004. MGC'2003 generated substantial interest in the community and we hope to build on this tradition this year. Far from exhausting the topics of interest, it paved the way for a second edition of the workshop.
The goal of the second edition of the MGC workshop is to bring together researches in the field of middleware, addressing largescale and real world problems in grid environments, including the most interesting and stimulating topics emerged last year, and some novel ones as Strategies and Protocols for obtaining Quality of Services, Virtualization, Wireless Grids, Data Grid Middleware, Semantic Grid Middleware, Dependability and Fault Tolerance in Grid Middleware and Managing Information.
The second workshop received an unexpectedly high number of quality submissions and fifteen papers were chosen for these proceedings out of the forty eight originally submitted. Additionally nine posters have been invited. The presenters highlight issues and solutions in one or more of the themes identified for the workshop.
As full papers there were contributions addressing different topics and common issues related to Resource Management and Scheduling by Chen and Agrawal, Talwar et al., Andreozzi et al., Araki, and Venugopal, Buyya and Winton. They focus on streaming data, remote desktop sessions in utility grids, monitoring connectivity in grids, autonomic www servers, and data-oriented applications. Addressing Security there were papers by Dodonov, Guardia and Sousa, and Detsch et al. They examine security in the context of securing hosts from malicious greedy applications and in peer-to-peer base grid computing. Addressing aspects on Strategies and Protocols for QoS there was a paper by Z Cai et al., investigating a network aware middleware for interactive large-data applications. Examining issues related to Data Grid Middleware and Services there were papers by Fontes et al., Kosar, Kola and Livny, and Aloisio et al. They examine a data and program integration service, data pipelines enabling large scale multiprotocol data transfers, and advanced delivery mechanisms. On Managing Information there was a paper by Zhao et al., presenting a grid middleware service for virtual data discovery, composition and integration. On Programming Models, Tools and Environments, there were contributions by Vianna et al., Cicerre, Madeira and Buzato, and Camargo et al. They explore hybrid scheduling algorithms, hierarchical process execution, and checkpointing based rollback recovery.
Additionally there were poster contributions by Coulson et al., Ziviani et al., and Araújo, Cirne and Mendes on Resource Management and Scheduling, focusing on a management gridkit, calculations and usage of network measurements, and hiding resources behind brokers. Nassif et al., and Assunção, Koch and Westphall present posters on commons issues on Agent based Grid Middleware, using agent-based negotiation and resource allocation, and grid-based network / systems management. Cecchet, Quema and Boutaleb present a poster on resource-driven component deployment in the topics of Classic and Data Grid Middleware and Services. Biswas and Pal present a poster on Programming Models, Tools, and Environments, using a dataflow approach for grid computing. Finally, there were contributions by Schaeffer Filho et al., and Yamolenko et al. on Evolution of and Experiences with Grid systems, describing a practical usage in sequence alignment and pi-calculations.
We would like to thank the authors and the participants for presenting their work and contributions on research in middleware for grid computing. Additionally we would like to thank all the reviewers for providing constructive reviews and specially thank all members of the program committee for helping to shape the workshop program.
Bruno Schulze, Distributed Scientific Computing Group, National Lab for Scientific Computing LNCC, BR
Radha Nandkumar, National Center for Supercomputing Applications NCSA, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign UIUC, US
