Bringing Instruments to a Service-Oriented Interactive Grid

Current Grid technologies offer unlimited computational power and storage capacity for scientific research and business activities in heterogeneous areas over the world. Thanks to the Grid, different Virtual Organizations can operate together in order to achieve common goals. However, concrete use cases demand a more close interaction between various types of instruments accessible from the Grid, and the classical Grid infrastructure, typically composed of Computing and Storage Elements. We cope with this open problem by proposing and realizing the first release of the Instrument Element (IE), i.e., a new Grid component that provides the Computational/Data Grid with an abstraction of real instruments, and the Grid users with a more interactive interface to control these instruments. In this thesis we describe in detail the proposed software architecture of the IE, also by discussing the functional and non-functional requirements on which its design is based. The non-functional requirements demands not only deep interaction between users and devices to control instruments, but also the adoption of high interoperable solutions, which only Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) based technologies, like Web/Grid Services, can offer. Therefore, in order to solve the trade-off between the necessity of universality/interoperability and performance, we propose a set of solution that improves the performances of a SOA System, in terms of both throughput and latency of service invocations. Moreover, in order to fulfill the Quality of Service (QoS) nonfunctional requirement, we also devise a methodology that allows remote method execution times to be predicted. This makes it possible, for example, to select an alternative service that better guarantees the fulfilment of execution deadlines. Still according to our analysis of non-functional requirements, we also address the problem of determining fast communication methods to permit instruments to properly inter-operate. In this regard, we investigate different publish/subscribe architectures, and we show that RMM-JMS is the best candidate solution for accomplishing this task. It is worth noting that even though all these solutions and results have been motivated, devised and exploited during the design of our IE, any application based on Web and Grid Services can benefit from them. Finally, all our proposals are validated using suitable benchmarks and extensive tests and comparison with alternative solutions.