Software is required to address these difficulties.  GOLD will determine which of them must be addressed in detail and will provide technological and management solutions.

Project Structure

GOLD is divided into 6 workpackages:

• Cultural and management implications of VO participation

The cultural and organisational factors including how businesses without a history of previous cooperation might be encouraged to participate commercially in virtual organisations. This workpackage will determine technical and informational requirements for cooperative working and investigate how knowledge management may provide continuous assurance of business benefits delivery and promote business trust in a dynamic environment.

• Full lifecycle management

Effective VOs (particularly highly dynamic ones) must be functionally highly-integrated and their resources able to interact strongly with the resources of other organisations. However, it is essential that participating organisations are not required to share technical, cultural and organisational infrastructure as this would severely limit dynamism. To achieve this, a number of basic services must be abstracted into middleware. In addition, traditional workflow models are largely static and unable to cope with highly dynamic environments. The workpackage will develop a dynamic workflow enactment service and supporting workflow and project/VO lifecycle services and tools.

• Information management

Information management is vital for successful project management, particularly within a virtual organisation. Information tends to be distributed and have different formats and structures. It may belong to several different organisations and may introduce issues related to privacy and secrecy. This workpackage will develop Grid middleware services and tools concerned with locating, integrating and actively routing data, information and knowledge, so that it reaches the appropriate people when it is needed.

• Trust

Resource sharing depends on trust. Companies participating in a VO must be able to trust each other for their relationships to be productive. This workpackage will provide mechanisms for trust acquisition and management through the use of trust policies. It will also develop Grid services for contract management and automatic dispute resolution.

• Security

Security is a primary concern of the project and its supporting industry sectors. Successful adoption of the project’s middleware will depend on appropriately designed and implemented security measures. In particular, this workpackage will provide Grid services and tools for: authorisation (role-based or task-based access control for the Grid); privacy and secrecy of data; distributed yet coordinated security management; and secure audit.

• Demonstrator and integration

This workpackage will develop the middleware and tools specific to the Chemical Engineering demonstrator and will also investigate demonstrators in other industries. It will combine the development activities in three main integration points, which will coincide with the release of executable code.

GOLD Software Architecture

Click here for the initial GOLD software architecture.  This will be updated frequently.

Management Structure

A Project Steering Committee (PSC) has been formed to provide overall supervision, technical planning and financial control. It is chaired by Tony Scott (Director, SOCSA) and will meet three times per year, with the first meeting planned for April 2004.  Membership will comprise the lead academic and industrial collaborators. The PSC will have overall responsibility for general technical and financial, planning control and monitoring of the project to ensure that the project retains focus and delivers scientific advances; major contributions to Grid stretch; step changes in business processes (business intensification) and tangible business benefits. It will also have high-level responsibility for re-allocation of effort if appropriate as the project proceeds. A schedule of meetings appropriate to the challenges and deadlines of the project will be agreed at the first meeting of the PSC. Since GOLD involves close collaboration between geographically distributed parties, the communications infrastructure will play a significant role and will reflect the recognised track record of the North East Regional e-Science Centre and the Foresight Centre CPACT in successfully managing large national and European multi-university, multi-company projects.

Overall responsibility for day-to-day project management lies with the Project Management Team comprising the GOLD Project Manager (Adrian Conlin), Allen Wright (Chemical Engineering) and Rob Smith (NEReSC).  This team has responsibility for delivery of the project goals through scientific coordination between the project teams; internal and external dissemination of results; effective communication between computer science, chemical engineering and business disciplines, and for integration and coordination of the individual tasks.  The team meets weekly to discuss and action issues and progress.

Three focussed teams have been established:

• The Software Delivery Team is led by Hugo Hiden (GOLD Architect) and Rob Smith.  It is responsible for deploying development resources on a day-to-day basis and will ensure the delivery and quality of the software developed by GOLD.

• The Chemical Development Team is led by Allen Wright and Elaine Martin and is responsible for the application-level requirements and demonstrator scoping and development

• The Business team is led by Paul Dunning-Lewis at Lancaster University and will ensure business fit and effective requirements capture

The workpackage structure is highly integrated and researchers/developers will be deployed flexibly as the project demands, although they will develop specialities.  This arrangement ensures optimal use of resources.

Finally, an Industrial Advisory Panel (IAP) will shortly be established and expanded as the project progresses.  This will  allow independent observers from other sectors to advise and comment on issues related to the wider generic aspects and exploitation of the GOLD research and business deliverables. Representation will be sought from a wider range of business, commerce and manufacturing organisations than those within the consortium, for example food processing, micro-electronic component manufacturing, construction, and relevant Government Departments such as the UK RDAs, DEFRA, The Chemicals Leadership Council, and European Agencies.

Arrangements for potential take-up and wider application of the project outputs

The immediate application of the GOLD project is within the UK chemicals industry through a key industrial drive to significantly reducing time to market. The involvement of SOCSA, Britest the ONE North East Centre for Process Innovation (CPI), CPACT and the INSIGHT Faraday Partnership in High Throughput Technology will ensure a high level of exposure across a substantial proportion of the UK chemical industry to the technologies developed. Unisys are currently undertaking expansion of their portfolio of clients in the chemicals and pharmaceuticals industries. They believe that by investing in Grid infrastructure and offering Grid solutions, they can broaden their customer base.

The GOLD project also has wide applicability outside the domain of the chemicals industry. Many of the key deliverables are applicable in industrial and commercial contexts and in this respect the project offers, for the first time, the opportunity to make highly dynamic virtual organisations scalable and easily manageable.

As an additional measure to encourage wider exploitation, all Grid Middleware Services produced by the GOLD project will be licensed as open source software using the model employed by the OGSA-DAI e-Science project and made available to the Grid/e-Science communities at large. All the Grid Services will implement core, generic functionality required by a wide range of Grid applications and will be OGSA compliant. They will be tested according to the procedures specified in the NEReSC Core Grid Middleware Testing Procedure, using the Codeworks7/NEReSC Regional Grid Testbed and the Grid Middleware Fault Injection software produced by the NEReSC e-Science project e-Demand. This will ensure that all released middleware will have guarantees concerning their quality, robustness, reliability etc. NEReSC will provide user support for these services to project members and other adopters throughout the lifetime of the project and will incorporate them into its Core Grid Middleware suite to provide limited support after the project has ended.

An Exploitation Committee will be appointed from the consortium members at project kick-off. Exploitable results will be patent-protected and commercial exploitation will follow Research Council and University of Newcastle guidelines. The applicants have experience of progressing IPR and Confidentiality Agreements in large academic-industrial consortia to regulate ownership and the use, publication and dissemination of sensitive data and project results. Such agreements will be put in place between all participants prior to project launch. Project R&D results advancing e-Science and increasing the understanding of the methodologies explored will be disseminated in journals and via a project web site.

Current Status

GOLD officially started on February 1st 2004.  The following milestones have already been achieved:

• Recruitment of the majority of staff and students including a full-time Project Manager and an Archiect
• Initial software architecture
• Initial project plans
• Development process identified
• Development environment and distributed test environment being built