Imperial College London

Internet Centre


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Internet Applications and Funded Projects

Science Grids (Dr. David Colling)

From the start of the UK e-Science programme the London e-Science Centre and the Internet Centre have worked very closely with the High Energy Physics (HEP) group led by Professor Dornan and Dr Colling in the Department of Physics. This work has contributed to the development of Grid infrastructures and middleware to support the CERN Large Hadron Collider experiments. The Internet Centre contributes considerable HPC resources to the London Tier-2 node of the Large Hadron Collider Grid (LCG) and serves on the London Tier-2 management committee. The Centre is currently working with the HEP group in the GridPP and EGEE projects that are building and operating the LCG infrastructure and is also a partner in the EU GridCC project that is developing an infrastructure to support the real-time control of instruments and experiments over the Grid or Internet.

As well as contributing to the LCG, the Internet Centre’s HPC Facilities are now also now shared with the UK National Grid Service (NGS).

Grid Middleware (Dr. Stephen McGough)

The development of software technologies to support the high-level construction of complex applications has been a long-term research interest of Professor Darlington and the Centre, tracing its origins back to pioneering work in functional programming and program transformation. The London e-Science Centre developed the ICENI component-based application development and execution framework. ICENI was a pioneering SOA and was used and tested in several major e-Science Pilot Projects including, Reality Grid, e-Protein and GENIE, http://www.lesc.imperial.ac.uk/projects/ , http://www.lesc.imperial.ac.uk/iceni/

The Centre is also a partner in the EU Network of Excellence, CoreGrid, which is investigating Grid and Internet software technologies

Internet Markets (Jeremy Cohen)

As described previously, work stemming from the e-Science project: “A Market for Computational Services”, is central to the Internet Centre’s activities and plans. This work is being continued in the PpUSoft spin-out and in an EU project, GridEcon, that is exploring the NGI’s markets and economics. 

Led by Jeremy Cohen and Dr. Richardson, the Internet Centre is also developing a relationship with the Singapore Management University, the Singapore National Grid Office and the Sun Asia Pacific Science and Technology Center. Jointly we are developing a proposal under the British Council UK/Singapore e-Science Collaboration scheme to address issues of Grid economics and markets. 

The Centre is also a partner in two Grid-market oriented EPSRC projects in the Department of Computing: Grid Market Simulation and Grid-enabled Performance Analysis using Stochastic Logics (GRAIL) led by Professor Harrison and Dr. Knottenbelt respectively. 

Internet Economics (Dr. Thierry Rayna, Dr. Colin Richardson)

The Centre’s work on Internet economics, again stemming from the Markets project, has been very rewarding and influential. We are privileged to have the services of Dr Colin Richardson, an experienced and distinguished economist. Colin’s study of the Internet market and brokering structure led to a reinterpretation under the economic theory of Catallaxy of von Hayek (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catallaxy) which translated elegantly into a computational Peer-to-Peer realisation, christened MAGOG (Middleware for Activating the Global Open Grid). The MAGOG distributed P2P architecture seems ideally suited to Internet-scale resource discovery and sharing, and simulations and implementations of this infrastructure are continuing. Figure 11 illustrates the MAGOG architecture.

magog

Figure 11. MAGOG

Mobile Services (Jeremy Cohen, Dr. Janko Mrsic-Flogel, Professor Kin Leung, Professor John Polak)

Mobile services, that is services available to individuals away from fixed office or home locations, are potentially a rich source of Internet applications. There is more context available; where people are going, why and by which mode of transport, and greater scope for assistance and replanning when circumstances change. The Internet Centre has a long history of rewarding collaboration with Professor Polak and the Centre for Transport Studies at Imperial. Recently this activity has been strengthened by the involvement of Professor Kin Leung, who holds the Tanaka Chair in Internet Technology and is a world-leader in communication networks and technologies. These relationships have enabled the Internet Centre to build up a strong portfolio of mobile or transport related projects. Many of these projects are also collaborative with Transport for London. These projects currently comprise  (IC – Internet Centre, TC – Tanaka Chair, CTS – Centre for Transport Studies, TfL – Transport for London):

Life Sciences and Medical Computing (Dr. Marko Krznaric)

The Internet Centre has a strong record of collaboration with Life Sciences and with the Faculty of Medicine. The Centre has worked closely with Professor Sternberg and Dr. Butcher of the Bioinformatics Centre and the Bioinformatics Support Service. The Internet Centre provides HPC facilities for the Bioinformatics Support Service and currently collaborates on several projects including: 

In the Faculty of Medicine the Internet Centre provides HPC support to a number of groups, including the Microarray Centre. It is also a partner in the following projects: 

Public Services and e-Government (Dr. Paul Nelson, Professor John Darlington)

Public-service or government Internet services could be an important element in the NGI and provide an ideal way for government and other public agencies to improve citizen involvement and empowerment and  increase the productivity and effectiveness of public services. The Internet Centre has a good relationship with the UK Government Cabinet Office e-Government Unit and is involved in the Cross-government Data Mashing Laboratory initiative that is exploring ways of making government data and services available for the public good.

The Internet Centre is working with a medic, Dr Paul Nelson, to develop an Internet service, entitled phrisk, for the community support of suffers from chronic diseases, in the first instance people with diabetes. Phrisk will provide a community where diabetes suffers can enrol and share their experience and knowledge with like individuals. The point is to both empower patients to take responsibility for their condition and also to provide a supportive community so that no one feels isolated or alone. Phrisk will also provide a community ‘Wikipedia’ where experience, expertise and knowledge on diabetes can be accumulated and shared.

Figure 12. The phrisk Diabetes Community Care Service. 

Phrisk will also include facilities for the electronic measuring, recording and monitoring of members’ conditions, not only blood sugar levels but also other life-style related factors such as blood pressure and weight. Analytic tools will be provided to allow patients to assess trends and compare their condition with statistical norms. This monitoring would provide a comprehensive record of a patient’s condition so that, when they see their GP the doctor would be able to make a much more informed and realistic assessment of the patient’s overall condition than they would relying solely on short and infrequent consultations.

Phrisk is now in beta testing and we plan to release a live version soon. We believe that the development of such community services is the best, perhaps the only, way to increase community participation in public services and to achieve the growth in productivity and effectiveness of these services that the UK government is clearly seeking in return for its investment.


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