GSoC students make significant contributions to OMII-UK software

Back to index page

Previous article: Bioinformatics, e-Science and the Grid: a symbiotic relationship

Next article: Meeting the Audi challenge

This year’s Google Summer of Code (GSoC) brought together 1500 students and 2000 mentors from 90 countries worldwide, all for the love of code! This was OMII-UK’s first year as a mentoring organisation, and what a summer it’s been. We succeeded in attracting six students who worked hard all summer and made significant contributions to several OMII-UK open-source projects.

Petar Jovanovic, a third-year student at Union University in Serbia, worked on a plugin that allows Matlab scripts to be run as part of a Taverna workflow (subject to licensing restrictions, of course). This will be an immensely useful addition to Taverna, because Matlab is widely used in research. Scientists will be able use Petar’s plugin to use Matlab's mathematical capabilities to process data in Taverna workflows.

Michael Micelli, an undergraduate at Louisiana State University, worked on a MapReduce implementation to demonstrate the power of SAGA (a Simple API for Grid Applications). MapReduce is a programming framework for data-intensive distributed computing. It allows data to be distributed amongst several machines, before being processed and reduced to produce an output. An exemplary, if trivial, example would be the use of MapReduce to count the number of times each word occurs in a number of documents that have been distributed over a number of machines. Michael’s sample application is a great demonstrator for SAGA, and we are sure it will help further SAGA’s adoption.

Yasir Mehmood constructed a Gluing Service to allow medical applications using different grid middlewares to work together using the SAGA APIs. If you’re interested in this work and you are attending the AHM 2008, please come and check out the demonstration of Yasir’s Gluing service with a client application (a pipeline service). Nicola Salvo, who has just completed an MSc in Grid computing at Cranfield University, developed a Visual Workflow editor for OGSA-DAI. The provision of such a tool simplifies the construction of OGSA-DAI's data-centric workflows. The GUI queries a service, finds out what activities are available and then allows them to be composed into an OGSA-DAI workflow, which can be targeted at an OGSA-DAI service. A palette provides an overview of the available activities, which are composed by moving them into an assembly panel. At first, Nicola’s tool will be used as an OGSA-DAI demonstrator.

Soo-Hyun Choi, a final year PhD student at UCL, worked on implementing a congestion control protocol over a Video Conference tool (VIC). This GSoC project has resulted in the production of a TCP-friendly, Windows-based, congestion-control module for VIC. The module provides useful information to the multimedia codec, so that it can generate multimedia frames in a smart way for a better service. This work will help to improve the quality of Access Grid sessions.

Finally, Suraj Waghulde, a masters student at the University of Texas, has been working on automatic, semantic-workflow generation for the integration of bio-informatics Web Services. Static workflows are usually created by adding services as components. The intent is to search for the required services by giving semantics to Web Services using the Universal Service Description Language (USDL). Some of this work could find itself integrated with Taverna.

As you can see, thanks to the support from Google, these six students along with their respective mentors have been working hard over the summer to improve the quality and functionality of OMII-UK software. We’re looking forward to participating in the Google Summer of Code 2009. If you have any ideas as to how OMII-UK software might be taken forward, please get in touch. You never know, next year you could be mentoring your very own summer student!

Mario Antonioletti.

www.tinyurl.com/43ddpk

www.tinyurl.com/33u7df