Background

Open Grid Computing Environment (OGCE) E-Science toolkit provides a platform for scientists to compose, execute, monitor and share their experiments as scientific work flows. E-Science projects are often conducted to solve problems
in domains such as particle physics, bio-informatics, earth sciences, etc. Such projects involves large amount of budgets and tend to be long term. Moreover, parties (resource providers, scientists, users etc.) involved in these types of projects belong to different organizations such as governments, universities and private firms and are essentially dispersed over the globe. Experiments conducted often require interacting with numerous other systems to perform tasks such as user authentication, data extraction, conversion and validation in additional to experiment-related computations. Therefore, coordination
between these parties during experiments require significant amount of effort, time and computing knowledge.

However, most of the scientists and users from various disciplines who participate in E-science projects don't have (nor do they need) sufficient computing knowledge or the time to set up and manage the infrastructure required to conduct their experiments. This affects not only for individual scientists (and other stake holders) but also for the ultimate goals of the
project as well. E-Science toolkit project aims to minimize these burdens by not only automating scientific workflows but also providing supplementary services such as registry services and middleware support.

E-Science Toolkit

E-Science toolkit helps scientists to focus on solving the problem at hand without worrying about technical details related to managing the infrastructure.

E-Science toolkit is comprised of three main components namely: -

1. WS-Messenger
2. Workflow tracking library
3. graphical scientific work flow composer

WS-Messenger is a web services based, publish-subscribe middleware which caters for messaging requirements of other components in the E-science toolkit. It implements two specifications namely WS-Notifications and WS-Eventing which are meant to standardize such systems. WS-Messenger released as a standalone distribution hence further improving its usability outside of E-Science domain.

Usually scientific experiments are evolving processes, which mean scientists will design their workflows based on initial objectives, later on modify/refine them based on the new objectives, previous results etc, until desired results
are obtained. During this process scientists need to observe not only initial parameters/data supplied and final results, but also intermediate results as well. Additionally Scientists may require reproducing results or validating the steps involved in an experiment later on. To cater this requirement E-Science tool kit provides a library to monitor workflows as they are executed. This workflow tracking library facilitates its users to view various events generated during a workflow execution such as invocations of each steps, partial results generated, errors encountered etc.

The most important component provided by the E-Science tool kit is Xbaya ndash; A user friendly program which enables scientists to develop, execute and monitor scientific workflows with aid of a GUI. The real power of the Xbaya
is, it simplifies the workflow creation into a set of drag and drop operations, allowing users combine various scientific applications and reasearch into a meaningful experiment with a minimal effort. Moreover, Xbaya hides technical complexities involved in invoking these scientific applications and gathering results, thus making the life easier for its users.

Funding

It is worth noting that the project is an collaborative project, and the initial software is developed at Indiana University. However, Lanka Software Foundation has also made significant contributions to the project, and we believe that effort like this would help Sri Lanka in building recognition in the research arena.

Important Milestones

• Project was initially developed by Indiana University (and other collaborating universities) as a part of large E-Science project named “Linked Environments for Atmospheric Discovery (LEAD)” which process U.S wide weather data.
• In August, 2009 Lanka Software Foundation (LSF) partnered up with Indiana University with the vision to make this set of tools more accessible and domain independent, hence making it usable in future E-Science projects word wide.
• The contributions LSF made to the messaging subsystem of E-Science toolkit were presented at the IEEE International Conference on Web Services (ICWS) in July 2010, which is considered to be a significant milestone for the project.
• The project has successfully released two major versions for the software, where version 1.1 being the latest. Project team at LSF actively develops the software and expected to release another version soon with improved support for service and data registries.

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