The EQUATOR e-Science projects bridge the gap between existing grid technologies - such as Globus Toolkit 3 (GT3) - and the mobile and interactive devices, sensors and user interfaces that are typical of EQUATOR's activities. In these projects we are extending with generic support for devices, sensors and mobile interfaces, especially considering devices and networks previous out of scope for grid technologies (i.e. small and intermittantly connected). Globus Toolkit Extensions overviewA 'grid' is a wide-area distributed computing infrastructure, that supports sharing of computation, data and other resources across potentially diverse and dynamic distributed communities of users. However current grid technologies - such as Globus Toolkit 3 (GT3) - presume that devices (or services, at least) will (a) have always-on network connections, usually with high bandwidths and (b) have the CPU and memory capacity to run substantial pieces of software to support standard protocols and interactions. When considering the kinds of devices and applications common in EQUATOR both of these presumptions are often untrue. Consequently, we have been extending GT3 to provide support for small, intermittantly connected devices, and to provide standard ways to expose devices and sensors on the grid. We have defined new generic OGSA service port types (the standard kinds of interfaces to grid services) for making devices and sensors visible on the grid. We have also developed a proxy-based architecture and initial implementation which allows small and intermittantly connected devices to be exposed as grid services. To date, this has been applied to the Antarctic lake monitoring device in the Antarctic lake carbon cycling project, the lifejacket (a version of the cyberjacket) and a java-phone based diabetes monitoring device in the mobile medical monitoring project.
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