We describe the initial phase of a research project to develop an artificial life framework designed to extract knowledge from large data sets with minimal preparation or ramp-up time. In this phase, we evolved an artificial life population with a new brain architecture. The agents have sufficient intelligence to discover patterns in data and to make survival decisions based on those patterns. The species uses diploid reproduction, Hebbian learning, and Kohonen self-organizing maps, in combination with novel techniques such as using pattern-rich data as the environment and framing the data analysis as a survival problem for artificial life. The first generation of agents mastered the pattern discovery task well enough to thrive. Evolution further adapted the agents to their environment by making them a little more pessimistic, and also by making their brains more efficient.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) in the medical field has the potential to dramatically influence the way in which everyday clinical care and medical research is conducted. NLP systems provide access to structured content embedded in raw medical texts, therefore enabling automated processing. There are however, several barriers prohibiting wide spread adoption of NLP technology primarily driven by the complexity and cost. This paper describes an approach and implementation which leverages cloud-based deployment and service-based interfaces to extract, process, synthesize, mine, compare/contrast, explore, and manage medical text data in a flexibly secure and scalable architecture. Through a virtual appliance architecture users are able to discover, deploy and utilize NLP engines on demand without requiring knowledge of the underlying, potentially complex, NLP engine. As highlighted in this paper, the system architecture can scale in several configurations: by increasing the number of instances deployed, the number of NLP engines, and the number of databases.

This paper examines the problem of giving mobile users a possibility to access interoperability services based on ontologies and predefined concepts providing various meaningful objects and mechanisms to search, discover, invoke, compose and monitor appropriate grid-based services, applications as well as data sources in the Virtual Organization (VO) from any place in the world using mobile devices. Since mobiles as end devices are naturally used by humans to see a ’human-readable’ content, in our opinion, they should also allow them to specify ’human-readable’ queries instead of direct computer-interpretable queries to unknown remote service providers or databases. Based on the knowledge located in the interoperability space user’s requests from mobile devices can be mapped and forwarded automatically to appropriate remote interfaces to take advantages of various functionalities offered by the grid and service providers available today in the Internet. Therefore, more efficient interaction between the user and remote service provider(s) can be established. In our approach, the real ontology services are available from mobile devices via the gateway due to weaknesses of mobile devices and the complexity of the ontology layer within the grid infrastructure. In this paper we describe several grid-based services developed for mobile users as well as some core services which have been adopted to work with mobile devices. Roles of a mobile client, grid-services and gateway played in some novel scenarios of ontology usage are also described. Finally, in this paper we discuss issues related to obstacles and limitations that we have been facing while using the chosen J2ME technology, and the ways we are solving them.

Abstract Grid‐enabled portals are becoming increasingly popular as a platform for providing access to Grid services and resources. Unfortunately, much of the work done in portal development has led to vertically layered solutions that work for a particular project but are difficult to extend or reuse for other projects. The GridSphere portal framework seeks to address these limitations by providing a framework that will offer external developers a model for easily adding new functionality and hence increasing community collaboration. The GridLab portal will serve as an initial prototype to showcase the GridSphere framework and provide access to services being developed within the GridLab project. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

We present a synopsis of the Grid Application Toolkit, under development in the EU GridLab project, along with some of the new application scenarios which it will enable.

Abstract In this paper we report on the features of the Java Commodity Grid Kit (Java CoG Kit). The Java CoG Kit provides middleware for accessing Grid functionality from the Java framework. Java CoG Kit middleware is general enough to design a variety of advanced Grid applications with quite different user requirements. Access to the Grid is established via Globus Toolkit protocols, allowing the Java CoG Kit to also communicate with the services distributed as part of the C Globus Toolkit reference implementation. Thus, the Java CoG Kit provides Grid developers with the ability to utilize the Grid, as well as numerous additional libraries and frameworks developed by the Java community to enable network, Internet, enterprise and peer‐to‐peer computing. A variety of projects have successfully used the client libraries of the Java CoG Kit to access Grids driven by the C Globus Toolkit software. In this paper we also report on the efforts to develop serverside Java CoG Kit components. As part of this research we have implemented a prototype pure Java resource management system that enables one to run Grid jobs on platforms on which a Java virtual machine is supported, including Windows NT machines. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Abstract We describe a Grid‐based collaboratory that supports the collaborative development and use of advanced simulation codes. Our implementation of this collaboratory uses a mix of Web technologies (for thin‐client access) and Grid services (for secure remote access to, and management of, distributed resources). Our collaboratory enables researchers in geographically disperse locations to share and access compute, storage, and code resources, without regard to institutional boundaries. Specialized services support community code development, via specialized Grid services, such as online code repositories. We use this framework to construct the Astrophysics Simulation Collaboratory, a domain‐specific collaboratory for the astrophysics simulation community. This Grid‐based collaboratory enables researchers in the field of numerical relativity to study astrophysical phenomena by using the Cactus computational toolkit. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The Testbed and Applications working group of the European Grid Forum (EGrid) is actively building and experimenting with a grid infrastructure connecting several research-based supercomputing sites located in Europe. The paper reports on our first feasibility study: running a self-migrating version of the Cactus simulation code across the European grid testbed, including "live" remote data visualization and steering from different demonstration booths at Supercomputing 2000, in Dallas, TX. We report on the problems that had to be resolved for this endeavour and identify open research challenges for building production-grade grid environments.

Grid Portals, based on standard Web technologies, are emerging as important and useful user interfaces to computational and data grids. Grid portals enable virtual organizations, comprised of distributed researchers to collaborate and access resources more efficiently and seamlessly. The Astrophysics Simulation Collaboratory (ASC) Grid Portal provides a framework to enable researchers in the field of numerical relativity to study astrophysical phenomenon by making use of the Cactus computational toolkit. We examine user requirements and describe the design and implementation of the ASC Grid Portal.