Open Source Environments for Collaborative Experiments in e-Science

Open Source Software (OSS) for e-Science should make reference to the paradigm of a distributed surrounding over a multi system mix of Web Services and Grid technologies, allowing data exchanging through services, according to standards in the area of the Grid and of Service Oriented Computing (SOC). In fact, biologists, medical doctors, and scientists are often involved in time consuming experiments and are aware of the degree of difficulty in validating or rejecting a given hypothesis by lab experiments. The benefits of OSS for e-Science consider that as many operating nodes as possible can work cooperatively sharing data, resources, and software, thus avoiding the bottleneck of licenses for distributed use of tools needed to perform cooperative scientific experiments. In particular, this chapter presents an architecture based on nodes equipped with a Grid and with Web Services in order to access OSS, showing how scientific experiments can be enacted through the use of a cooperation among OSS sites. Such a choice, besides reducing the cost of the experiments, would support distributed introduction of OSS among other actors of the dynamical networks, thus supporting the awareness about OSS and their diffusion. An OSS environment for cooperative scientific experiments (e-experiments) can effectively support the distributed execution of different classes of experiments, from visualization to model identification through clustering and rules generation, in various application fields, such as bioinformatics, neuro-informatics, tele-monitoring,or drug discovery. By applying Web Services and Grid computing, an experiment or a simulation can be executed in a cooperative way on various computation nodes of a network equipped with OSS, allowing data exchange among researchers. Our environment formalizes experiments as cooperative services on various computational nodes of a grid network. Basic elements are models, languages, and support tools creating a virtual
network of organizational responsibility of the global experiments, according to rules under which each node can execute local services to be accessed by other nodes in order to achieve the whole experiment’s results.