Guest Editor's Introduction: Best Papers from the GCC 2006 Conference

It is my great honor to bring out a special issue of International Journal of Parallel, Emergent and Distributed Systems containing extended versions of Best Papers from the 5th International Conference on Grid and Cooperative Computing that was held in Changsha, China, in October 2006. The conference successfully served as a forum to present current and future work as well as to exchange research ideas on grid computing, web services, cooperative computing, and high performance computing, including theory and applications. Participants, including many researchers from academia and industries around the world, exchanged their ideas about the basic theories, technologies and applications. Compared with former GCC conferences, the most important feature of this conference is that it emphasized high performance computing, data-centric internet computing, and inter-operating technologies among different grid systems. Participants investigated into and reached a common understanding of several challenging problems through a panel discussion ‘Grid research and engineering vs. standards’ emphasizing:

1. How can research creativity be reconciled with the need for, and use of, standards and ‘standard’ software?

2. What are the most important challenges (and possible solutions) in managing in an integrated manner the middleware, data, users and resource that make up a grid?

3. How can grid-users/developers be provided with an integrated ‘on the Grid’ development environment?

4. What are the essential aspects of the ‘engineering science’ needed for grid systems that are interoperable, scalable, robust, sustainable and maintainable?

The conference received 407 papers from 15 different countries/areas. After careful and rigorous reviewing, only 52 of them were accepted as regular papers (12%) and 35 as short papers (10%). The overall acceptance rate was 22%. The conference lasted for three days. Authors gave wonderful representations; world famous companies, such as HP, Platform, EMC, Voltaire, Downing Tech., exhibited their latest achievements on grid computing; and a technical panel was held, in which experts from America, Europe and Asia shared their experiences and discussed key problems during grid development.

Among all accepted papers, the five best papers were selected due to their novel ideas and creative solutions for this special issue. The authors of these highly rated papers were invited to extend their papers and additional reviewers were sought to ensure that papers met the high standards expected from the journal.

‘A distributed workflow management model for grid middleware’ by Chen, Qu and Zhao proposes a distributed workflow management model for grid middleware. It divides workflow management interfaces into workflow execution engine management, workflow service management and workflow job management. With the implementation and experiment of this model for CGSP middleware, the usability of this model is verified through the use of workflow tools in an image processing scenario, and its scalability and load balancing ability are proved in workflow scheduling tests.

‘Approaching simple and powerful service-computing’ by Liu and Xu attempts to explore a proper bound of the simplicity of services, applications, and their interaction. By proving that any Turing machine is equivalent to the interaction product of three generalized finite automata, they show that the services can be as simple as generalized finite automata, and their interaction can be as simple as an interaction product. This result is generally helpful in distributed-system design for achieving low cost and high productivity.

‘A service-oriented monitoring system with a forecasting algorithm of a time sequence-based hybrid model’ by Xiao, Fu, Chen and Huang presents a novel service-oriented monitoring system with a flexible and scalable service-oriented architecture. An open and extendable information schema is adopted to standardize data contents; Web Service interfaces are employed to provide inter-operative ability for different grid systems. As a feature, a time sequence-based forecasting algorithm is provided for precise performance prediction. Experiments showed that the performance is comparable with other famous monitoring systems.

‘Gridscape II: An extensible grid monitoring portal architecture and its integration with Google Maps’ by Gibbins and Buyya presents Gridscape II, a customizable portal component that can be used on its own or plugged-in to complement existing Grid portals. It manages the gathering of information from arbitrary, heterogeneous and distributed sources and presents them together seamlessly within a single interface. To provide an interactive user interface they leverage the Google Maps API, providing a solution to those users who do not wish to invest heavily in developing their own monitoring portal from scratch, and also for those users who want something easy to customize and extend for their specific needs.

In ‘Method of using BDI agents to implement service-oriented workflow mapping in AGWMS’ by Cao et al., three types of workflow are denoted as abstract workflow (AW), concrete workflow (CW) and executable workflow (EW). It proposes a method of using Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) agents to implement service-oriented workflow mapping in the agent-based grid workflow management system (AGWMS) of the ShanghaiGrid. BDI agent technology helps the system meet challenges from the grid context. Contract Net Protocol (CNP) provides a very proper negotiation model for these agents. The problem of workflow mapping has been transferred to the problem of multi-agent negotiation with the help of a CNP model in AGWMS. AW2CW and CW2EW mapping algorithms are also given to accomplish service-oriented workflow mapping.

All these five papers emphasized grid applications and inter-operations between different grid systems. Specifically, ‘A distributed workflow management model for grid middleware’ and ‘Method of using BDI agents to implement service-oriented workflow mapping in AGWMS’ did solid work on grid workflow, while ‘A service-oriented monitoring system with a forecasting algorithm of a time sequence-based hybrid model’ and ‘Gridscape II: An extensible grid monitoring portal architecture and its integration with Google Maps’ succeeded to integrate information from heterogonous systems. Besides, ‘Approaching simple and powerful service-computing’ clearly defined the bound of services, applications, and their interaction. All of them did excellent work and made major contributions to the field of grid computing.