Computing and Information Systems - Research Publications
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ItemDeployment of grids through integrated configuration management(ACTA Press, 2008)A Grid environment typically comes into existence when several collaborating institutions contribute resources for researchers to solve problems of mutual interest. Such collaboration of personnel and resources are commonly referred to as a Virtual Organization (VO). The process to establish and manage a VO can be a time consuming and laborious process with installation and configuration of VO specific software and data needed across sites. Configuration management technologies can facilitate this process, however to support the establishment of Grid based VOs, it is necessary to align and integrate Grids and configuration management technologies. This alignment should recognize that sites may have their own flavors of configuration management tools and Grid technologies, and allow VO administrators to seamlessly deploy and configure Grid resources across multiple sites. This paper presents the experiences in developing and testing such an integrated Grid and configuration management framework.
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ItemE-Infrastructures for clinical epidemiological studies across Scotland(International Association for Development of the Information Society (IADIS), 2008)As the proliferation of digital data about individuals increases the opportunities for leveraging this information to benefit society become correspondingly greater. This is especially true in the domain of e-Health where a large number of disparate clinical data resources exist around the world, often housed in individual systems, but with great potential to advance medical and health-care provision if harnessed together and linked with other data resources. In this paper we present a variety of projects that federate such health and other data through re-usable and adaptable e-Infrastructures targeted to the needs of the Scottish and wider e-Research communities. At the heart of all these systems and to counter societies natural wariness of such systems and their use of their personal information are fine grained and adaptable security systems which restrict and enforce access to data to authorised individuals. In this paper we outline these e- Infrastructure architectures, their associated security models and how we are applying them to support epidemiological studies.
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ItemTowards a Virtual Anonymisation Grid for Unified Access to Remote Clinical Data(IOS PRESS, 2008)Grid technologies provide an infrastructure through which, amongst other things, data access and integration is facilitated across highly distributed and heterogeneous resources. Different domains have their own requirements on the nature of this data access and integration. The clinical domain offers arguably the greatest challenges facing the roll-out and adoption of Grid technologies to meet the changing face of post-genomic clinical research, especially with regard to information governance, ethics and hence security solutions. This paper outlines a novel system design for secure anonymous data access and linkage that meets the needs of key stakeholders in this space including end user researchers, data providers and owners and ethical oversight bodies amongst others. We identify how existing solutions developed within the Medical Research Council funded Virtual Organisations for Trials and Epidemiological Studies (VOTES) project are being re-factored to meet the needs of these players and to address information governance criteria.
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ItemScalable, security-oriented solutions for nanoCMOS electronics(National e-Science Centre, University of Glasgow, 2008)The EPSRC pilot project Meeting the Design Challenges of nanoCMOS Electronics (nanoCMOS – www.nanocmos.ac.uk) has been funded to tackle some of the challenges facing the semiconductor electronics industry caused by the progressive scaling of CMOS transistors. As transistor dimensions are now at the nanometer scale with 40nm MOSFETs already in mass production and sub-10 nm transistors scheduled for production by 2018, the intrinsic parameter fluctuations caused by the inherent discreteness of charge and matter at this atomistic scale are now one of the major challenges that the semiconductor electronics industry needs to address. The variability at the device level affects profoundly the circuit/system design process and hence can be regarded a semiconductor industry-wide problem. Fortunately many of the statistical variability related issues can be understood and forecasted through large scale simulation of ensembles of potentially hundreds of thousands of atomistically varying devices. However, one of the main distinguishing features of NanoCMOS when compared to other high performance computing (HPC) simulation domains is the imperative requirements on fine grained security. The data, the designs and even the simulations themselves all potentially have highly sensitive commercial intellectual property (IP) value associated with them, ranging from the IP of device manufacturers and the design houses through to licenses needed to run simulation and design software. This paper outlines the e-Infrastructure that has been developed within the nanoCMOS project with specific focus upon the security capabilities it supports and how these address the IP protection requirements of the industrial and collaborating partners. Our ultimate goal is to provide an environment that addresses security across the board and scales to meet the HPC and data management requirements of nanoCMOS research.
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ItemA resource-oriented data management architecture for nanoCMOS electronics(National e-Science Centre, University of Glasgow, 2008)The EPSRC pilot project Meeting the Design Challenges of NanoCMOS Electronics (nanoCMOS) began in October 2006 and is focused upon tackling the decreasing scale of modern semiconductor components. This scaling has direct impact upon the complete circuit and system electronics design process due to the variability in transistor behaviour caused by differences in atomic structure. To address these challenges, the project has focused upon large scale device simulations exploiting a wide variety of computational resources. This paper focuses on the approach adopted for managing the many hundreds of thousands of files being generated that are associated with these simulations. Specific challenges in achieving this are related to the fine grained security demanded in protecting intellectual property of data and metadata, and the seamless linkage of metadata associated with services. We believe that this data architecture has widespread applicability to many research areas.
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ItemA functional and performance-oriented comparison of AFS and SRB(National e-Science Centre, University of Glasgow, 2008)In this paper the Storage Resource Broker (SRB) [1] and the Andrew File System (AFS) [2] are compared and contrasted in terms of their use as a data storage for Grid based systems. Both the SRB and AFS are distributed file systems capable of storing data produced and consumed by applications and Grid services. The SRB is well established and deployed by many projects globally include widespread deployment across the UK e-Science National Grid Service. AFS is also a distributed file system initially developed as part of the Andrew Project by Carnegie Mellon University and IBM in 1983. AFS is currently being used by the nanoCMOS project [3, 4] for providing secure access to data and applications through usage of Kerberos tokens. While both SRB and AFS can be used as data back ends they have specific properties that make them better suited for different types of usage. In some cases this may be a critical issue where some feature is required but not available in one or both of the candidates. This paper provides a description of these differences, focusing in particular on the security models, their relative performance with a range of file sizes and their general usability. Based on this analysis we present the key criteria that projects should consider for adoption of file based data management.
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ItemGrid security(CRC Press, 2009)Security is essential for inter-organizational collaborative e-Research. Without robust, reliable, easy to understand and manage e-Research security models and their implementations many communities and wider industry will simply not engage. To support inter-organizational, inter-disciplinary research it is essential e-Research security infrastructures support several key (defining) characteristics …
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ItemMulti-level simulations to support nanoCMOS electronics research(International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering, 2009)
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ItemGrid security: practices, middleware, and outlook(National e-Science Centre, 2005)Middleware, Practices and Outlook report was funded by JISC to explore the landscape of Grid security. The report summarises experiences of existing Grid middleware and practices today including Public Key Infrastructures and their limitations. A review of advanced authorisation technologies and developments within the Internet2 community are also explored with regard to their potential impact upon Grid based e-Research.