Achieving interoperability between Grid infrastructures is required by all users consuming computing time for projects spanning across Grid domain boundaries. Standards naturally evolve slowly and on Grid level only a few have been proposed and widely accepted so far, among them JSDL. This paper describes how GridSAM which supports JSDL in combination with JMEA can be used to submit jobs to a UNICORE infrastructure and hence how the number of Grid projects accessible via GridSAM can be increased right now.

This paper describes the development of a Job Management Enterprise Application (JMEA) which was developed by the DEISA material science and plasma physics joint research activities. It is capable of submitting jobs to a UNICORE server infrastructure and managing them. Since it is a Java EE application, it can be used by multiple users concurrently. Furthermore, it prefetches and caches request results in order to able of responding as quick as possible to client requests. In addition to normal user credentials it also supports the use of proxy credentials and explicit trust delegation.

DEISA (Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputer Applications) is collecting experience with science gateways in different scientific areas and aims at combining all current efforts. This paper describes the development of the DEISA material sciences and plasma physics Web portal application from the view of a project engineer and software architect. It analyzes user requirements, motivates technology choices, and describes the realization of an application that is very similar to the first release candidate. The outlook gives insight into the development steps currently being undertaken towards a release and the planning phase for a future release, as well as the DEISA aims. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A supercomputing hyper-grid spanning two continents was created to move a step towards interoperability of leading grids. A dedicated network connection was established between DEISA, the leading European supercomputing grid, and TeraGrid, the leading American supercomputing grid. Both grids have adopted the approach of establishing a common, high performance global file system, the wide-area version of IBM's GPFS. Teragrid's approach is based on a single site server solution under Linux, hosted by San Diego Supercomputer Centre, DEISA's approach is a multi-site server solution, with currently servers in France, Germany and Italy. These two Grid-internal global file systems were interconnected over a dedicated, trusted network connection. During the Supercomputing Conference 2005, Grand Challenge applications were carried out both within DEISA and within Teragrid, and results were written transparently to the combined global file system with physically distributed locations of the involved disk systems. Simulations were carried out in Europe and in America, and results were directly written to the respective remote continent, accessible for all participating scientists in both continents, and were then directly further processed for visualization in a third location, the SC05 exhibition hall in Seattle. Grand Challenge applications used for the demo included a Protein Structure Prediction and a Cosmological Simulation carried out at San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), US (www.sdsc.edu) and a Gyrokinetic Turbulence Simulation and also a Cosmological Simulation carried out at Garching Computing Centre of the Max Planck Society (RZG), Germany (www.rzg.mpg.de).

We describe a versatile and extensible integrated bioinformatics toolkit for the analysis of biological sequences over the Internet. The web portal offers convenient interactive access to a growing pool of chainable bioinformatics software tools and databases that are centrally installed and maintained by the RZG. Currently, supported tasks comprise sequence similarity searches in public or usersupplied databases, computation and validation of multiple sequence alignments, phylogenetic analysis and protein-structure prediction. Individual tools can be seamlessly chained into pipelines allowing the user to conveniently process complex workflows without the necessity to take care of any format conversions or tedious parsing of intermediate results. The toolkit is part of the Max-Planck Integrated Gene Analysis System (MIGenAS) of the Max Planck Society available at www.migenas.org (click 'Start Toolkit').

We present architecture, design and application of a highly modular engine for processing complex workflows of computational tasks. The specific implementation of this engine focuses on the integration of a wide range of bioinformatics software packages into a single system tailored to microbial genome research. The corresponding web application provides a user-friendly interface to all integrated tools and offers comprehensive functionality required for the analysis of microbial genomes. Individual tools can be chained in pipelines allowing users to efficiently handle complicated workflows involving large datasets.