The Remote Instrumentation Infrastructure that is set up by the DORII project offers a promising vision how the modern grid computing technology can support and enhance the level of managing, maintaining and exploiting heterogeneous instruments and acquisition devices for the e-Science. The DORII Grid infrastructure enables remote instrumentation for the Grid in practice and allows users and e-Science applications to get an easy and secure access to various remote instrumentation resources, supported by high-performance computation and storage facilities of the traditional Grid as well as underlying networking technologies. Middleware composes an important layer of the Remote Instrumentation Infrastructure, as it is intended to promote the Grid resources to the application developers as well as applications to the end-users in the production use.

This page aims at potential users of the DORII middleware solutions and presents a description of the DORII middleware architecture and its main components, followed by an additional information about releases, quality assurance and middleware users' support.

1. DORII Middleware Architecture

2. Software Releases

• Latest Release (2.0)
• Previous Releases
• Release and Testing Procedure

3. DORII Software Development Environment (GForge@SVN)

• Source Code Access
• Access to the Software Release Packages

4. User Support

The middleware architecture proposed for DORII aims at setting up a highly configurable, user-centric and open source user and development environment that adopts best practices from a number of previous Grid ICT projects for the Grid support of e-Science communities as well as their applications and operated instruments and sensors. The architecture consolidates tools, services and solutions for the remote instrumentation support and resources’ management on the Grid (outcome of the RINGrid and GRIDCC projects), application development (g-Eclipse) and workflow management (VLAB), parallel applications’ support (Open MPI).

The architecture is composed of the following modules, those functionality covers the identified users' needs on the integration of the remote instruments to the grid and support of the remote instrumentation application:

Adopting those tools by the common architecture, DORII pursued the development process from existing releases in order to ensure that the full potential of the Remote Instrumentation Infrastructure and Grid technologies is enabled for the e-Science. Guided by users' and applications' requirements and feedback, we significantly improved the user and developer support on the Grid, redesigning the user's Grid frontend and collaborative environment (VCR) as well as providing solutions for construction and management of scientific applications' workflow. Moreover, the Instrument Element solution was reimplemented from the scratch, enabling the remote instrumentation concept for a wide range of scientific devices controlled and operated remotely. Furthermore, addressing the complex issues of the component integration, the DORII developments will set up a flexible environment that provides consistent and enjoyable developer and end­-user experience. The basic element of the environment is a Java Common Library that acts as the client side to the underlying Grid middleware and related components (g-Lite). Whereas the DORII Common Library is intended to be a building block for the VCR and WfMS tools, it will be beneficial for use in other projects dealing with the Remote Instrumentation and generally Grid technologies as well. The best practices of our research and developments will be also promoted to other development communities like g-Eclipse and Open MPI.

The goals of the DORII project include among others the release of a number of open-source software components. The user feedback is important for the DORII development as considered to be an important improvement guideline for the middleware components.

The Release 1.0 of the DORII middleware was done at the end of M12 of the project (January 2009) and contained the prototype of integrated products. The prototype allowed for early deployment of the pilot applications [link] on the DORII infrastructure. The feedback, provided by the end users with suggestions of new features and improvements of existing ones for the middleware components, was taken as a guideline for the realization of the Plan for Adaptation of Components and resulted in the second, production quality release of the DORII middleware. Currently, the Release 2.0 contains the most actual version of the DORII components.

The modules, the Release 2.0 of the DORII middleware components is composed of, are introduced in the table below.

• Release 1.0

DORII Integration Team (IT) has been established as a technical discussion forum for the DORII project. Its activities focus on quality assurance of the adopted software components and tools and their adequate integration. DORII-IT released the procedures document that aims to define and to promote the best practices for the DORII software releases in order to obtain quality software with adequate integration that provides consistent and enjoyable end-user experience. The evaluation results can be found here (accessible only for middleware developers)

The DORII developments are supported by GForge which is is a collaborative environment with an intuitive interface that ties together a huge tool set, from source code version control and file release systems to on-demand customizable Trackers, Forums and Mailing Lists, used for the organization of the software development process. DORII@GForge is a Forge service set up for the DORII Joint Research Activities.

The following features are currently provided by the DORII-GForge:

The source code of the DORII software solutions is open source (released under the DORII License) and maintained by means of the Subversion Version Control System (SVN). The code is accessible at https://svn.gforge.hlrs.de/svn2/dorii-jra/middleware. For getting access please refer to the User Support section.

The DORII software is redistributed by means of the File Release System available at the Link. The access to released components is public, no DORII@GForge is required.

The bugs notified in the release components can be reported to the Bug Tracking System.

For contacting the DORII source code administrator please use the mailing list.