Requirements and Design of a Collaborative Online Visualization and Steering Framework for Grid and e-Science infrastructures

Many production e-Science infrastructures (e.g. DEISA, D-Grid) have begun to offer a wide variety of services for end-users during the past several years. Many e-Scientists solve their scienti c problems by using parallel computing applications on clusters and collaborative online visualization and steering (COVS) is known as a tool for analyzing and better understanding of these applications. In absence of a widely accepted COVS framework within Grids, visualizations are often created using proprietary technologies assuming a dedicated scenario. This makes it feasible to analyze the usual requirements to provide a blueprint for a more general COVS framework that can be integrated into Grid middleware systems such as UNICORE, gLite, or Globus Toolkits. These requirements lead to a design that was successfully implemented as a higher-level service in UNICORE and presented at numerous places such as the Open Grid Forum 19 and 20, Europar 2006, Supercomputing 2006 and DEISA trainings