MYGRID: Directly Supporting the E-Scientist

MYGRID was an EPSRC funded research project.

Brief Description

To date, Grid development has focused on the basic issues of storage, computation and resource management needed to make a global scientific community's information and tools accessible in a high performance environment. However, from an e-Science viewpoint, the purpose of the Grid is to deliver a collaborative and supportive environment that allows geographically distributed scientists to achieve research goals more effectively.

MyGrid will design, develop and demonstrate higher level functionalities over an existing Grid infrastructure that support scientists in making use of complex distributed resources. The project will develop an e-Scientist's workbench that supports: (I) the scientific process of experimental investigation, evidence accumulation and result assimilation; (ii) the scientist's use of the community's information; and (iii) scientific collaboration, allowing dynamic groupings to tackle emergent research problems. The workbench will support individual scientists by providing personalisation facilities relating to resource selection, data management and process enactment.

The design and development activity will be informed by and evaluated using problems in bioinformatics, which is characterised by a highly distributed community, with many shared tools resources. MyGrid will develop two application environments, one that supports individual scientists in the analysis of functional genomic data, and another that supports the annotation of a pattern database. Both of these tasks require explicit representation and enactment of scientific processes, and have challenging performance requirements.