Special Issue: Selected Papers from the U.K. e‐Science All Hands Meeting in 2006

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U.K. e-Science All Hands Meetings provide a premier forum for the exchange of ideas and the dissemination of research findings from a broad range of e-Science research activities and projects across all disciplines. Since 2001, the U.K. e-Science Core Programme has funded more than 100 research projects to develop e-Science techniques and applications. The year 2006 was particularly an important year for the U.K. e-Science Programme, as many of the first set of e-Science pilot projects had completed with significant outputs and the Programme itself was moving into a new phase towards the establishment of a U.K. national e-Infrastructure for research and innovation. In response to this important transition, the fifth All Hands Meeting (AHM 2006) was held on 18th–21st September 2006 at the East Midlands Conference Centre in Nottingham, U.K. The theme of the conference—Achievements, Challenges and New Opportunities—reflected precisely our willingness to review past achievements, highlight current challenges and identify future opportunities for e-Science. AHM 2006 attracted approximately 630 delegates from both the U.K. and overseas. Submissions of papers and proposals for workshops and sessions reached a record level: 84 papers were accepted out of 128 submitted, 10 out of 25 workshop proposals were selected and 5 out of 13 BoF session proposals. This special issue of Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience contains extended versions of seven best papers, which were selected from the 84 quality papers and accepted after an additional peer review process. Multidisciplinary research is a key driver for e-Science innovation. The accepted papers in this special issue cover a diverse range of disciplines, including computer science, physics, medicine, chemistry and social sciences, which represent some of the most innovative and exciting research projects within the U.K. e-Science community. In particular, Nicholson et al. examine different data replication methods in the large hadron collider (LHC). The results from the simulation of the LHC computing grid show that dynamic replication does give an improved job throughput. For the complex Grid system assessed, simple replication strategies, such as, least recently used (LRU) and least frequently used (LFU) are as effective as more advanced economic models. Periorellis et al. introduce the GOLD e-Science pilot project (Grid-based information models to support the rapid innovation of new high value-added chemicals), which aims at carrying out research into enabling technology to support the formation, operation and termination of virtual organizations. This paper discusses the issues with the GOLD infrastructure such as trust, security, contract monitoring and enforcement, information management and coordination. Wang et al. present a new service-oriented approach to the design and implementation of visualization systems in a Grid computing environment. Different from a traditional dataflow visualization system, which is typically based on processes communicating via a shared memory or sockets, this approach builds a collaborative environment in which visualization Web services are linked in a pipeline using the subscription and notification services available in Globus Toolkit. Hughes et al. describe a wireless sensor network for flood warning, which is not only capable of integrating with remote fixed-network Grids for computationally intensive flood modelling purposes but also capable of performing on-site flood modelling by organizing itself as a local Grid system. A combination of local and remote computation can provide adaptation of the sensor network to maintain optimal performance in changing environmental conditions. Kharche et al. present a 3D computer model of human atrium with detailed anatomical structures and cellular electrophysiology. This model provides an alternative to experimental methods to investigate the cellular ionic and molecular mechanisms underlying the genesis and control of atrial fibrillation (AF) in humans. Bruin et al. address the Grid job submission problem by developing the ‘my_condor_submit’ (MCS) tool. The MCS tool provides a simple scriptable interface to Globus, a flexible interaction with the storage resource broker (SRB), meta-scheduling with load balancing within a Grid environment and automatic metadata harvesting. Chadwick et al. demonstrate a role-based authorization infrastructure called PERMIS along with its conceptual authorization, access control and trust models. PERMIS has the novel concept of a credential validation service, which verifies a user's credentials prior to access control decision making and enables the distributed management of credentials. Finally, I would like to express my sincere thanks to Dr Nik Looker for his continuous support and contributions to the whole process of preparing this special issue and to the colleagues who have served as reviewers for the submissions.