Grid-Based Distributed Collaborative Environments for Applied Space Sciences
Antonio Congiusta, Domenico Talia · 55th International Astronautical Congress of the International Astronautical Federation, the International Academy of Astronautics, and the International Institute of Space Law · 2004
Space research activities often require joint efforts of several groups of scientists, engineers, and professionals in order to cope with the inherent multi-facet issues. Disciplines like Collaborative Engineering and Concurrent Engineering are helpful practices providing means, technologies and methodologies to enable people to cooperate and to efficiently fulfill the design and developing phases. Typical scenarios are characterized by several specialized teams belonging to different organizations and located at remote sites. At the same time, also instrumentations, devices, and software applications may need to be shared, accessed remotely, and may be owned by third parties. Computational Grids are distributed computing infrastructures enabling the direct and coordinated access to computing resources shared by different organizations. The Grid approach other than allowing for the execution of high performance distributed applications promotes a vision for sophisticated international scientific and business oriented collaboratories (the so called Virtual Organizations). Thus, Grid technologies represent a valid and profitable supporting platform for the development of a new generation of Distributed Collaborative Environments. The paper gives an overview of basic motivations, features, and general requirements of Distributed Collaborative Environments, marking out also main advantages of their use in space related researches and activities. Next, all Grid-related benefits and enabling services/technologies are analyzed. Finally, an architectural framework for the deployment of a Grid-based collaborative environment is proposed, along with a set of technical solutions for addressing implementation issues.