Putting Social Science Applications on the Grid
Robert Crouchley, T van Ark, J. J. Pritchard, John M. Kewley, RJ Allan, Mark Hayes, Landi Morris · 2005
As e-Social Science develops, there will be a growing user base of social researchers who are keen to share resources and applications in order to tackle some of the large-scale research challenges that confront us. They will be aware of the potential of e-Science technology to provide collaborative tools and provide access to distributed computing resources and data. However social scientists are not ideally catered for by the current Grid middleware and often lack the extensive programming skills to use the current infrastructure to the full and to adapt their existing “heritage ” applications. In late 2003, a lightweight client toolkit that is easily installable, yet provides extensible access mechanisms to Grid resources was seen as a possible solution. By implementing a client-side polling strategy, problems associated with institutional firewalls for Grid protocols can be reduced. This is an alternative strategy to a Grid portal, easing the access problems while still sharing the same underlying services and infrastructure. A prototype library called GROWL: Grid Resources on Workstation Library was developed to use a client-server model to interface to existing Grid Services from applications written in C, C++, Fortran and R. Together with its associated wrapper services, GROWL is now being further developed into a number of demonstrators as part of the JISC-funded Virtual Research Environment (VRE) Programme by a collaboration from CCLRC Daresbury Laboratory and