Section: Other Grants and Activities

European Collaborations

IP SOA4All

Service Oriented Architectures for All (SOA4All) is a Large-Scale Integrating Project funded by the European Seventh Framework Programme, under the Service and Software Architectures, Infrastructures and Engineering research area.

Computer science is entering a new generation. The emerging generation starts by abstracting from software and sees all resources as services in a service-oriented architecture (SOA). In a world of services, it is the service that counts for a customer and not the software or hardware components which implement the service. Service-oriented architectures are rapidly becoming the dominants computing paradigm. However, current SOA solutions are still restricted in their application context to being in-house solutions of companies. A service Web will have billions of services. While service orientation is widely acknowledged for its potential to revolutionize the world of computing by abstracting from the underlying hardware and software layers, its success depends on resolving a number of fundamental challenges that SOA does not address today.

SOA4All will help to realize a world where billions of parties are exposing and consuming services via advanced Web technology: the main objective of the project is to provide a comprehensive framework and infrastructure that integrates complementary and evolutionary technical advances (i.e., SOA, context management, Web principles, Web 2.0 and Semantic Web) into a coherent and domain-independent service delivery platform.

OASIS is involved in work packages 1 (SOA4All Runtime ), 2 (Service Deployment and Use) and 6 (Service Construction).

We strongly collaborate with the ObjectWeb/TUVALU EPI and also ADAM, from which Philippe Merle is co-leading with Françoise Baude the PhD thesis of Virginie Legrand-Contes.

IP Bionets

The OASIS team is involved in the European project called BIONETS (BIOlogically-inspired autonomic NETworks and Services)

The motivation for BIONETS comes from emerging trends towards pervasive computing and communication environments, where myriads of networked devices with very different features will enhance our five senses, our communication and tool manipulation capabilities. The complexity of such environments will not be far from that of biological organisms, ecosystems, and socio-economic communities. Traditional communication approaches are ineffective in this context, since they fail to address several new features: a huge number of nodes including low-cost sensing/identifying devices, a wide heterogeneity in node capabilities, high node mobility, the management complexity, and the possibility of exploiting spare node resources. BIONETS aims at a novel approach able to address these challenges. BIONETS overcomes device heterogeneity and achieves scalability via an autonomic and localised peer-to-peer communication paradigm. Services in BIONETS are also autonomic, and evolve to adapt to the surrounding environment, like living organisms evolve by natural selection. Biologically-inspired concepts permeate the network and its services, blending them together, so that the network moulds itself to the services it runs, and services, in turn, become a mirror image of the social networks of users they serve.

The team is involved in work packages 3.1 (Requirement Analysis and Architecture),3.2 (Autonomic Service Life-Cycle and Service Ecosystems), and 3.4 (Probes for Service Framework).

The project started in 2006, for 48 months, for a total budget of 127 kEuros. Project will terminate in March 2010.

Strep GridCOMP

GridCOMP is a Strep project under leadership of ERCIM. Denis Caromel is the scientific coordinator. The European partners are university of Pisa and CNR in Pisa, university of Westminster on the academic side, and GridSystems (Spain), IBM Zurich (Switzerland), ATOS Origin (Spain) on the industrial side. Additionally there are 3 partners outside Europe, namely from university of Tsinghua (Beijing, China), university of Melbourne (Australia) and university of Chile (Santiago, Chile).

GridCOMP main goal is the design and implementation of a component-based framework suitable to support the development of efficient grid applications. The framework implement the "invisible grid" concept: abstract away grid related implementation details (hardware, OS, authorisation and security, load, failure, etc.) that usually require high programming efforts to be dealt with.

The GCM implementation provided by OASIS in the GridCOMP EU project is based on ProActive. The design of this implementation follows these main objectives:

• Follow the GCM specification.

• Base the implementation on the concept of active objects. Components in this framework are implemented as active objects, and as a consequence benefit from the properties of the active object model.

• Leverage the ProActive library by proposing a new programming model which may be used to assemble and deploy active objects. Therefore, components in the ProActive library also benefit from the underlying features of the library.

• Provide a customisable framework, which may be adapted by the addition of non functional controllers and interceptors for specific needs, and where the activity of the components is also customisable.

After the first positive evaluation, the second evaluation of GridCOMP occurred this year and was very positive: “The reviewers are impressed by the fact that already two standards have been approved. The scientific work is excellent, the technical work is very good and so are the dissemination and exploitation activities. The review panel would like to congratulate the consortium.”

The project has started in July 2006, for a duration of 33 months, with an overall budget of 674 kEuros. It has been prolonged until Feb 2009.