News

SDSC researchers in the Data and Knowledge Systems (DAKS) program presented a tutorial on "Data Grid Management Systems" at this year's annual Association of Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Management of Data (ACM SIGMOD) conference, held in San Diego in June. Arcot Rajasekar, director of SDSC's DAKS Data Grids Technologies group, and researcher Arun Jagatheesan gave the tutorial.

Data Grid Management Systems (DGMSs) provide services that enable multiple organizations to manage inter-organizational data and resources. As the next generation of data handling systems, data grids are being built to manage petabytes of inter-organizational data distributed across many sites. Created by the cooperation of autonomous organizations, data grids require the coordination of both local and global policies, which is accomplished by the use of a global logical name space that spans all storage resources and digital entities.

Amarnath Gupta, director of the DAKS Advanced Query Processing Lab, and colleagues presented a demo on "BIRN-M: A Semantic Mediator for Solving Real-World Neuroscience Problems." BIRN-M is part of the NIH-funded Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN) collaboration, which is developing a multi-institution information management system for the Neurosciences in order to gain a deeper understanding of neurological disorders.

Because each institution specializes in a different subdiscipline and produces a database of its experimental or computationally derived data, a mediator module performs semantic integration over the databases to enable neuroscientists to perform analyses that could not be done from any single institution's data. The BIRN system architecture is a wrapper-mediator system, and the demonstration featured the entire operational system, including a variety of clients; a variety of remote neuroscience data sources; the query rewriting module; semantic registration; and capability-based translation.

Another data grid technologies tutorial is planned for VLDB 2003, the 29th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, which will be held in Berlin in September. More information about the VLDB is at http://www.vldb.informatik.hu-berlin.de/. SIGMOD and VLDB are major international conferences for database researchers.