GEMS 2 (Grid Enabling MIMAS Services)
The overall aim of the GEMS 2 project is to Grid enable data from the Satellite Image Data Service (SIDS) which will entail developing Open Geospatial Consortium Web Services (OWS) compliant web/grid services that will enable users to access large amounts of satellite imagery available through SIDS so that it can be transferred to a National Grid Service (NGS) compute node for large scale, CPU intensive analysis.
Grid-enabling SIDS (GEMS 2) builds on the first phase of GEMS (GEMS 1 in the following ways:
- As well as enabling access to data through a grid service, GEMS 2 will provide a data processing service through an OGC defined Web Processing Service. Few, if any grid data services have been using WPS yet and the experience gained in GEMS 1 will be key to the success of GEMS 2
- GEMS 1 integrated grid technology into a working production service (Casweb). The experience gained in GEMS 1 can only benefit the development and deployment of the GEMS 2 service
- Oracle and MS SQL Server database systems, but not MySQL, are limited in their ability to report table meta-data when being accessed through OGSA-DAI. This is a severe limitation if further data processing is required (as is often the case) and can be a deterring factor to those wishing to Grid-enable data. GEMS 1 has overcome this problem in MS SQL Server - technology adaptable to Oracle - with custom software which can be easily be integrated into GEMS 2
- Software bridge between the GSI certificates employed by OGSA-DAI and Athens/Shibboleth will be re-used either in a WS-Security or HTTPS (client authentication) configuration.