1. BACKGROUND This special issue focuses on middleware for Clouds and e-Science applications, and is based on extended, thoroughly revised papers from the 8th International Workshop on Middleware for Grid, Clouds and e-Science (MGC 2010) and the Workshop on Challenges in e-Science (CIS 2010). The authors were invited to provide extended versions of their original papers taking into account comm...

Distributed scientific work is receiving widespread attention from computer science developers within the e-Science programme. With notable exceptions less attention has been paid to how, in practice, collaboration support across the grid might play out in everyday scientific and analytic work. Drawing on a specific thread of research in Computer-Supported Cooperative Work we note how models of...

In this paper we demonstrate the use of agent technology to assist in the construction and enactment of e-Science experiments. Our approach is founded on the adaptation of an agent protocol language to perform composition of web services. We present a definition of the language, and show how it can be used to express e-Science experiments. We also describe a tool, called MagentA, which allows e...

Scientific research is supported by infrastructure, and e-infrastructure is one part of this. Repositories of data are a part of the e-infrastructure and have their own particular needs arising from the requirement for permanence of their data holdings. There are many threats to permanence, and there is a growing awareness of these threats and how they may be countered. Current Research Informa...

E-science experiments typically involve many distributed services maintained by different organisations. After an experiment has been executed, it is useful for a scientist to verify that the execution was performed correctly or is compatible with some existing experimental criteria or standards, not necessarily anticipated prior to execution. Scientists may also want to review and verify exper...

The rate of data production in the Life Sciences has now reached such proportions that to consider it irresponsible to fund data generation without proper concomitant funding and infrastructure for storing, analyzing and exchanging the information and knowledge contained in, and extracted from, those data, is not an exaggerated position any longer. The chasm between data production and data han...

This paper presents an experimental evaluation of the performance of standard SOAP compared with SOAP with Attachments (SwA) in communicating floating-point matrices of different sizes. Several key factors, including response time, size of SOAP message, and XML parsing time are addressed. In addition, these performance-related factors are also compared for two different formats of attachment – ...

As in many scientific disciplines, modern chemistry involves a mix of experimentation and computer-supported theory. Historically, these skills have been provided by different groups, and range from traditional 'wet' laboratory science to advanced numerical simulation. Increasingly, progress is made by global collaborations, in which new theory may be developed in one part of the world and appl...

for their meticulous note-taking. We also thank Microsoft Research and the Computer Science Department at Stanford. We had indeed advertised that we will be covering recent results in the course announcement. We had planned to cover Reingold's new result " SL=L " , which we presented in lecture as scheduled. Little did we expect that Irit Dinur would come up with a simple proof of the PCP Theor...