GRIDs Architecture

 

Keith G Jeffery  1

 

1 STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, UK

e-mail: kgj@rl.ac.uk

 

The end-user demands low effort threshold access to systems providing e-information, e-business and e-entertainment.  Innovators and entrepreneurs require also equally low-energy access to heterogeneous information homogenized to a form and language familiar to them.  On top of that, decision-makers – whether in a control room or government strategic planning - demand equally easy access to information that is statistically or inductively enhanced to knowledge, and access to modeling or simulation systems to allow ‘what if?’ requests.  Researchers and technical workers have an additional requirement for rapid integration of information with statistical, induction, modelling and simulation systems to generate and verify hypotheses so generating data and information – to be used by others - which in turn advances knowledge.  Access is required - and can now be provided - anytime, anyhow, anywhere through ambient computing technology.  A new paradigm, GRIDs, provides the architectural framework which hides the infrastructural complexity with middleware thus making applications software easy to develop and use.