| Middleware and the Divergent Grid |
| As the field of Grid computing matures, we are witnessing increasing diversification in both the style of Grid application being supported and also, crucially, in the underlying physical environment. For example, a number of contemporary e-Science applications feature complex computations running on high-end cluster computers linked to real-time data provided by sensor networks. The talk will highlight this important trend towards the "Divergent Grid" and focus on the real issues this raises for the design of Grid middleware. In particular, it will be argued that a significant paradigm shift is required towards middleware architectures that are more open, adaptive and indeed autonomic. The talk will also briefly consider the resulting implications for supporting formal reasoning about the (potentially emergent) properties of such systems. |
| Prof. Gordon Blair holds a Chair in Distributed Systems at Lancaster, and is also an Adjunct Professor at the University of Tromsø in Norway, and a Visiting Researcher at the Simula Research Laboratory in Oslo. He has published over 200 papers in his field and is on the PCs of many major international conferences in middleware and distributed systems. He is on the steering committee of the ACM/ IFIP Middleware series of conferences. He has been primarily responsible for a large number of research projects at Lancaster including most recently Open ORB, Runes and Open Overlays. Current research interests include distributed systems architecture, next generation middleware, reflection, self-healing, and the application of advanced middleware in areas such as the Grid and mobile/ ubiquitous computing. |
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