Project overview
The Grid is a large scale computer system that is capable of coordinating resources that are not subject to centralised control, whilst using standard, open, general-purpose protocols and interfaces, and delivering non-trivial qualities of service. While a number of projects have been reporting success stories, in which Grid computing was applied to highly visible scientific applications, a tremendous number of challenging issues still remain to be investigated in order to address this vision fully.Southampton and Chicago, which both have teams actively involved in multiple Grid and e-Science collaborations, share a remarkable number of common interests in the area of resource discovery, provenance, workflow languages, negotiation and virtual organisations. These different topics are being investigated in various projects in Southampton (myGrid, PASOA, EU Provenance, Conoise-G, Grimoires, Virtual Organisations for e-Science) and Chicago (GriPhyN, iVDGL, Globus). Additionally, the partners bring to the table complementary expertise from different communities: Grid and High Performance Computing, Agent-based computing and Semantic Web and Grid technologies.SOCA, the SOuthampton Chicago Activity, is a sister project that sets up a formal collaboration between Southampton and Chicago in order to investigate some fundamental issues related to Grids. The SOCA project will establish bridges between American and UK communities, but also between Grid and Agent communities, and between Grid and Semantic Grid communities.