Proposals for final year projects
Proposals for final year projects
1. The integration of CORBA components and DCOM components
with XML web
services technology.
CORBA and DCOM are two main standards for distributed
object computing. They
provide mechanisms to allow a client to access services
from a distributed
remote object. CORBA clients and objects are independent
of location,
platform and programming language. DCOM plays the same
role as CORBA. The
research issue here is that how to build a bridge to
link CORBA and DCOM
together, in which a CORBA client can access a service
from a DCOM object
and vice versa. XML based Web services such as WSDL,
SOAP, UDDI will be used
to fit the gap.
2. A Web based user interface to access computational Grid resources.
When we turn on an electric light with the flick of a
switch we usually give
no thought to where the power that illuminates the room
comes from -
generally, we don't care if the ultimate source of the
energy is coal, oil,
nuclear, or an alternative source such as the sun, the
wind, or the tide. We
regard the electricity as coming from the "National Grid"
which is an
abstraction allowing users of electrical energy to gain
access to power from
a range of different generating sources via a distribution
network. A large
number of different appliances can be driven by energy
from the National
Grid - table lamps, vacuum cleaners, washing machines,
etc. - but they all
have a simple interface to the National Grid. Typically
this is an
electrical socket. Another aspect of the National Grid
is that energy can be
traded as a commodity, and its price fluctuates as supply
and demand change.
Now imagine a world in which computer power is as easily
accessible as
electrical power. In this scenario computer tasks are
run on the resources
best suited to perform them. A numerically intensive
task might be run on a
remote supercomputer, while a less-demanding task might
run on a smaller,
local machine. The assignment of computing tasks to computing
resources is
determined by a scheduler, and ideally this process is
hidden from the end
user. This type of transparent access to remote distributed
computing
resources fits in well with the way in which many people
use computers.
Generally they don't care where their computing job runs
- they are only
concerned with running the job and having the results
returned to them
reasonably quickly. Transparency is a desirable attribute
not only of
processing power; it can also be applied to data repositories
where the user
is unaware of the geographical location of the data they
are accessing.
These types of transparency are analogous to our indifference
to how and
where the electrical power we use is generated. It is
also desirable that
remote computing resources be readily accessible from
a number of different
platforms, including not only desktop and laptop computers,
but also a range
of emerging network-enabled mobile devices such as Personal
Digital
Assistants (PDAs) and mobile phones. This is termed pervasive
access, and in
our analogy with the National Grid corresponds to the
widespread
availability on demand of electrical power via standard
wall sockets.
The Computational Grid is an abstraction allowing transparent
and pervasive
access to distributed computing resources. Other desirable
features of the
Grid are that the access provided should be secure, dependable,
efficient,
and inexpensive, and enable a high degree of portability
for computing
applications. Today's Internet can be regarded as a precursor
to the Grid,
but the Grid is much more than just a faster version
of the Internet - a key
feature of the Grid is that it provides access to a rich
set of computing
and information services.
This project will explore methods to provide a Web based
user interface to
access the Computational Grid. A user can submit a time-consuming
task such
as a molecular dynamic simulation to the Grid through
a Web page and get the
task done without knowing any infomration about the job
execution.