The UNICORE grid system provides a seamless, secure and intuitive access to distributed grid resources. In recent years, UNICORE 5 is used as a well-tested grid middleware system in production grids (e.g. DEISA, D-Grid) and at many supercomputer centers world-wide. Beyond this production usage, UNICORE serves as a solid basis in many European and International research projects and business scenarios from T-Systems, Philips Research, Intel, Fujitsu and others. To foster ongoing developments in multiple projects, UNICORE is open source under BSD license at SourceForge. More recently, the new Web services-based UNICORE 6 has become available that is based on open standards such as the Web services addressing (WS-A) and the Web services resource framework (WS-RF) and thus conforms to the open grid services architecture (OGSA) of the open grid forum (OGF). In this paper we present the evolution from production UNICORE 5 to the open standards-based UNICORE 6 and its various Web services-based interfaces. It describes the interface integration of emerging open standards such as OGSA-BES and OGSA-RUS and thus provides an overview of UNICORE 6.

The service-oriented model of the grid offers a wide range of computational capability that can be shared over the Internet. In this paper we describe a concept to create and configure execution environments that can be dynamically deployed using virtual machines onto bare hardware. This new paradigm allows more flexible usage of available hardware and is expected to decrease the efforts needed to configure and maintain nodes on a grid. A novel aspect of the architecture is the use of Web Services Resource Framework (WSRF) [4] and other emerging standards in the grid ecosystem. Based on these standards a prototype has been implemented that is used to create first results, and figure out challenges and future work following this new approach.

Large-scale scientific research often relies on the collaborative use of Grid and e-Science infrastructures that provide computational or storage related resources. One of the ideas of these modern infrastructures is to facilitate the routine interaction of scientists and their workflows with advanced problem solving tools and computational resources. While many production Grid projects and e-Science infrastructures have begun to offer services for the usage of resources to end-users during the past several years, the corresponding emerging standards defined by GGF and OASIS still appear to be in flux. In this paper, we present the GridBean technology that bridges the gap between the constantly changing basic Grid or e-Science infrastructures and the need of stable application development environments for the Grid users.

The protein L2 is found in all ribosomes and is one of the best conserved proteins of this mega-dalton complex. The protein was localized within both the isolated 50 S subunit and the 70 S ribosome of the Escherichia coli bacteria with the neutron-scattering technique of spin-contrast variation. L2 is elongated, exposing one end of the protein to the surface of the intersubunit interface of the 50 S subunit. The protein changes its conformation slightly when the 50 S subunit reassociates with the 30 S subunit to form a 70 S ribosome, becoming more elongated and moving approximately 30 A into the 50 S matrix. The results support a recent observation that L2 is essential for the association of the ribosomal subunits and might participate in the binding and translocation of the tRNAs.

Der LOCALITE Brain Navigator ist ein bildgestütztes Navigationssystem, das minimalinvasive neurochirurgische Eingriffe an interventionellen Kernspintomographen unterstützt, indem es Nachteile bestehender Systeme - die fehlende Integration einer Operationsplanung sowie die langsame Bildwiederholungsrate von ca. 0, 3 Hz, und schlechte Bildqualität der MR-Realzeitbilder - kompensiert. Basis für diese Verbesserungen sind intraoperativ gewonnene MR-Volumendatensätze mit deren Hilfe zunächst eine Operationsplanung durchgeführt wird. Während des Eingriffs werden mit ca. 5–10 Hz dem Realzeitbild entsprechende Schnittbilder mit deutlich gesteigerter Qualität aus diesen Volumendatens ätzen berechnet. Das Auffinden des Operationskanals wird durch eine speziell entwickelte Navigationsszene deutlich beschleunigt.

One of the major problems in neurosurgery is to find an optimal access route towards the area of interest, e.g., a lesion to be treated chirurgically. The quality of a route depends on the type of pathology to treat, its location, the functional areas surrounding it and many other aspects. The overall goal of route optimization is of course, to treat the patient as effectively as possible while minimizing additional damage. In addition, the operation field must be sufficiently accessible to the surgeon. To identify such a route, besides other aids, radiological images of the area of interest (often CT/MR-images) are consulted, and the decision is based on the location and extent of the pathology as discernible in the images, sometimes supported by functional MRI data. Unfortunately, two-dimensional images communicate only limited information about the spatial and structural relationships, although experienced radiologists and surgeons develop the ability to build mental models of the three-dimensional structures from the images alone. But this process takes much time and a lot of experience. Furthermore, surgeons and radiologists have to cooperate and come to a common understanding to find the optimum treatment. This proves difficult as they have radically different views on the patient. While radiologists often feel comfortable with stacks of two-dimensional images, the surgeon’s primary view is on what he finds once the skull is open. Computer technology can help to bridge the gap and shorten the discussion. Using the experiences from other medical projects we developed a software system that is built on the paradigm of enabling systems. This approach focuses on the cognitive processes that take place in the mind of experts and tries to support the less experienced user with cognitive aids that help to develop expertship faster and more easily. Under this paradigm, visualizations, algorithms, and technical aids are chosen primarily with respect to their ability to enable the user to gain insight into the data and the underlying processes. In the remainder of this article we give a short introduction into the paradigm, describe the application of enabling systems to neurosurgery and discuss our current system and its properties.