Project-1 DIAMOnDS

"DIAMOnDS - DIstributed Agents for MObile & Dynamic Services - is a Mobile Agents Framework for hosting dynamic services in the form of mobile agents. The framework is based on a service oriented architecture where the software mobile agents are registered/published as services, using their attributes as the basis of registration.

Initially, a basic infrastructure for mobile agents has been developed that allows hosting and secure movement of agents between different hosts- Agent Stations - deployed at different remote nodes across the WAN. This infrastructure has been tested for accurate agent mobility, reliability and security. The current efforts are directed towards use of such dynamic services in network monitoring, self organization, data manipulation on behalf of a user, calculating optimal network path for data transfer connections in WAN etc. Basic agent functionality from this framework can be extended to develop customized agents, tailored to a user/developer's needs.

This project is being carried out at National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), Pakistan in collaboration with California Institute of Technology, USA. The basic idea of such a framework has been derived from the following papers:

A Distributed Agent based Architecture for Dynamic Services by Harvey B.
Newman, Iosif C. Legrand and Julian B.Bunn.
A Self-Organizing Neural Network for Job Scheduling in Distributed Systems
by Harvey B. Newman, Iosif C. Legrand.

Project-2 MONALISA

"Monitoring Agents Using Large Integrated Services Architecture" is a Monitoring Service for the Grid Environment. Monitoring Service is a vital component for development of GRID Model. It helps the development of realistic "optimal" strategies for resource management and user interactions with Grids which is both resource constrained and  truly global in scope.

This prototype Monitoring system aims to provide a distributed monitoring service system using JINI/JAVA  and WSDL/SOAP technologies.  It acts as a dynamic service system and provides the functionality to be discovered and used by any other services or clients that require such information. This is part of a loosely coupled service architectural model to perform  effective  resource utilization in large, heterogeneous distributed centers.

The framework can integrate existing monitoring tools and procedures to collect parameters describing computational nodes, applications and network performance. It has build-in  SNMP support.

This project is being pursued in collaboration with Caltech, USA and Dr Iosif Legrand at CERN Geneva.

For further info pl visit:   http://monalisa.cern.ch/monalisa.html

Project-3 Title: Grid Enabled Physics Applications for Handheld Devices

This Project is being pursued through Active collaboration with California Institute of Technology (Caltech), USA. The basic architecture has been developed for such a system which is based on access to resources from the Grid infrastructure. It is using RDBMS (POSTGRESQL) to store the analysis data (ntuples). A special remote data server named Clarens (developed at Caltech) deployed at the core of our system will communicate with the databases and will return the ROOT Objects using OTL (Object Tag Library) and SQL2ROOT as Plug-in .These Objects downloaded on PDA from Clarens Server will be analyzed using JAS (Java Analysis Studio) and then will be rendered as Plotting of 1d, 2d histograms, XY plots, scatter plots etc. at PDA client. Well-defined interfaces will be developed to ensure seamless communication between these major components. The middleware will be designed to ensure communication between the backend and hand-held clients take place smoothly, independent of the client type.

Project- 4: Communicating Agents as Intelligent Web Services with Grid Services in Semantic Grid Environment

Our aim in this project is to leverage the intelligence of agents, resource sharing capabilities of grid, architecture and key technologies of web services (WSDL, UDDI), security, resource management and data management features of GLOBUS, capabilities of semantics web and use all these key technologies in order to make intelligent and resource sensitive grid services that can communicate with other grid services and agents published as grid services in a semantic grid environment. The motivation behind this idea is to bridge the gap between agents and web services in order to combine the best of two worlds and make this work in semantic grid environment.
This project is being pursued in collaboration with communication technologies, Japan

Project – 5: conscientia

The project conscientia aims to incorporate the redundant and loosely coupled nature of peer-to-peer networks, business-to-business integration of web-services, Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration of service oriented architecture (SOA) in UDDI Registries and platform independence of XML and Java for providing a platform for distributed services.

The applications of such a framework are:
Distributed data management for scientific and commercial applications.
Implementing distributed meta data catalogs.
Providing a mediator layer for accessing various database systems.
Ad Hoc Networks and mobile services.