PERVASIVE ACCESS TO THE DATA GRID § Sunirmal Khatua, Subhasis Dasgupta, Nandini Mukherjee { enggnimu@indiatimes.com , s_dasgupta@email.com , nmukherjee@cse.jdvu.ac.in } Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Jadavpur University, Kolkata 700 032, India Abstract: A natural extension of the existing Grid technology is to integrate mobile and low-profile devices into it and accessing the Grid services in a pervasive manner. However, the existing middleware for Grid does not support mobility in the Grid nodes and are generally suitable only for the high-profile service providers and clients. This paper proposes architecture for accessing Grid services from clients, which are low profile. The main focus of this work is to support day-to-day data-intensive query applications for commercial usages instead of scientific usages. Keywords: Grid Middleware, Data Services, Mobile Client, Pervasive Access 1. Introduction During the recent years Grid technology has emerged as the central technology for efficient resource sharing among many autonomous organizations known as “Virtual Organizations”[1] or VOs. The relationships among the VOs are dynamic and Quality of Service (QoS) plays an important role in defining these relationships. According to Foster [1] a Grid is such a system that coordinates resources, which are not subject to centralized control, uses standard, open, general-purpose protocols & interfaces and delivers non-trivial quality of services. With the proliferation of wireless and mobile technologies, a natural extension of the Grid-based computing would be to incorporate the mobile devices into a Grid environment and have access to the Grid-based applications in a pervasive way. The Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) [4], developed by the Global Grid Forum [3], is a common, standard, and open architecture for grid-based applications. OGSA aims at standardization of services that are commonly found in grid applications and specifies a set of standard interfaces for them. Within this architecture Grid requires a stable QoS provided by the VOs and changing of sharing relationship does not take place frequently. Thus, when mobile devices are integrated with the current Grid architecture, new challenges come forth and need to be confronted with. In mobile environment, networks are unstable, mobile devices can join and leave the network frequently and the quality of connection is also unpredictable. Moreover, these devices have limited resource capability and short battery life. The middlewares that have been developed for Grid environments target mainly the static and high-end computing resources and hence are unsuitable to work on service providers, as well as clients which are mobile. This paper proposes an architecture that will allow clients with low computing resources to be used in a Grid environment and access data resources distributed among the VOs through a wireless mobile network. The architecture is built on top of the Grid Services which are basically stateful web services that conform to a set of conventions for such purposes as service lifetime management, inspection and notification of service state change. 2. Associated Technologies and Related Works Grid services along with some middleware support are the emerging technologies in the field of large scale heterogeneous distributed computing. Globus [5] group in collaboration with several Universities like Argonne National Laboratory, University of Chicago, UC Los Angeles etc and Organizations like IBM, SGI, SUN etc. is the pioneer within this field. The Globus Toolkit developed by the Globus group is the standard middleware for § This work has been done as a part of the project “Extension of Grid Middleware to Incorporate mobile devices” under the “Centre for Mobile Computing and Communication” (www.cmccju.org ) Jadavpur University India and sponsored by UGC under the “University for Potential Excellence Scheme” India.