GRIA

Grid Resources for Industrial Applications
GRIA is the first Grid middleware designed specifically to support business use across organisational boundaries. Its architecture is driven directly by business requirements. GRIA has its origins in an EC Framework 5 IST collaborative project of the same name. Since the end of that project in 2004, the GRIA software has continued to develop, and is now an Open Source Product supporting a wide range of business models for providing and exploiting remote services using standard protocols.


GRIA Software Packages

GRIA is a service-oriented infrastructure designed to support B2B collaborations through service provision across organisational boundaries in a secure, interoperable and flexible manner. GRIA uses standard web service protocols based on key interoperability specifications. GRIA is now being used in a large number of projects to assess and exploit the use of service-oriented infrastructures for business collaboration.

GRIA is now being used in a large number of projects to assess and exploit the use of Grids and Service-Oriented Infrastructures in business. Typical end-user organisations include:


GRIA uses standard Web Service protocols based on interoperability specifications and is driven by the core requirements for inter-enterprise business applications:


To meet these goals, GRIA uses a fully decentralised management approach, with minimal dependency between sites.  Each site offering GRIA services makes its own business decisions about which users to trust and on what terms, and is responsible for enforcing its own access policies and deciding which applications to support.  Sites can interact with each other, but this is driven by their common consumers, and those consumers are responsible for managing the resulting dependencies. There are no global agreements to set up, and no virtual organisations need be established, though users can interact according to virtual organisation models if they want.


SIMDAT application and business requirements are driving GRIA developments so the infrastructure can be safely adopted by industry for the design of complex products. SIMDAT is developing a new Grid management infrastructure for GRIA based on Service Level Agreements that will allow business to trade resources (applications, data, processing, and storage) on terms appropriate to specific business partnerships. SIMDAT has developed a new business registry and allows contextualised discovery of distributed resources. GRIA’s job service has been aligned with JSDL and integrated the service with SLA based management to support Software as a Service (Saas) provisioning models. The combination of SaaS provisioning models and SLA-based management has allowed SIMDAT to deploy infrastructure that supports various Grid-based licensing models. All other services have been aligned with key interoperability specifications as defined in SIMDAT’s industrial Grid profile helping to ensure adoption and integration with existing problem solving environments.

GRIA is available free and open source (LGPL www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.html) from www.gria.org

Please contact info(at)gria.org for more information.


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