Grid Enabled Remote Instrumentation

Grid architectures, which are viewed as tools for the integration of distributed resources, play a significant role as managers of computational resources, but also as aggregators of measurement instrumentation and pervasive large-scale data acquisition platforms.  The functionality of a grid architecture allows managing, maintaining, and exploiting hetereogeneous instrumentation and acquisition devices in a unifed way by providing standardized interfaces and common work environments to their users.  This result is achieved through the properties of isolation from the physical network and from the peculiarites of the instrumentation granted by standard middleware together with secure and flexibile mechanisms which seek, access, and aggregate distributed resources.

This book focuses on a number of aspects related to the effective exploitation of remote instrumentation on the grid.  These include middleware architecture, high speed networking in support of grid applications, wireless grid for acquisition devices and sensor networks, quality of service provisioning for real time control, and measurement instrumentation.

Grid Enabled Remote Instrumentation stems from the 2^nd Workshop on Distributed Cooperative Laboratories - Instrumenting the Grid (INGRID 2007), held in Santa Margherita Ligure, Italy, from April 16 to 18, 2007. The material of all chapters is based on presentations held at the workshop, either as keynote addresses, invited or regular contributions. The book gathers contributions of recognized experts in these fields and provides a view of results from a number of recent and ongoing European projects on the subject of Remote Instrumentation and Grid computing.

Grid Enabled Remote Instrumentation emphasizes the role of Grid middleware and services in the domain of remote instrumentation. The authors offer a multidisciplinary viewpoint, covering distributed computing (such as grid computing HPC), visualization, data repositories (archiving systems, digital libraries), networking, and instrumentation and measurement aspects. The authors aim to set the basis for further development in the field and, at the same time, to offer an up-to-date and comprehensive overview of the field today.