The Telescience project: application to middleware interaction components

The Telescience Project/spl trade/ (https://telescience.ucsd.edu) aims to provide a complete, end-to-end, single sign-on solution for biomedical image analysis and structure-function correlation. Telescience merges advanced solutions for remote instrumentation (via Telemicroscopy/spl trade/), distributed data computation and storage, and transparent access to federated databases of cell structure. Here, we describe the Grid-based system architecture that enables the Telescience Project. This Grid service architecture provides a fabric for seamless interoperability among user interfaces (Web portals and applications) and externally addressable Grid resources (instruments and computers). Although many software components and tools provide some capabilities relating to enabling usable scientific grids, few systems offer the required complete interactions with grid infrastructures "out of the box". Significant time and effort, therefore, are needed for software evaluation, testing, and integration. Here we describe an emerging layer of the overall Grid infrastructure that provides a complete solution for application and portal developers to interact with core Grid functionality.