Glossary
e-Infrastructure
The term e-Infrastructure refers to the research environment in which researchers - whether working in the context of their home institutions or in national or multinational scientific initiatives - have shared access to unique or distributed scientific facilities (including data, instruments, computing and communications), regardless of their type and location. (CORDIS, http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/einfrastructure/).
Framework
A set of software (compile/run-time elements, libraries, tools, services), documentation, policies, procedures, that supports the implementation of technology specific higher level software elements.
gCore Framework (gCF)
A java-based application framework for (i) building high-quality gCube services that are easily deployable both via the infrastructure facilities and to a human and (ii) providing a runtime environment for such services. The framework is distributed with gCore.
gCube
gCube stands for Grid for Hardware, Data and Software. It is a multifaceted system as reflected by the definition below. A distributed service-based system for the autonomic operation of an e-Infrastructure for Virtual Research Environments (VREs). A distributed runtime platform for the development of interactive, service based e-Science applications. A full-featured, expandable, professional-grade and service-based platform that is sufficiently functional to create a broad range of dynamic production-ready applications VREs.
gCube Core Distribution (gCore)
A packaging of the components of the gCube system which are ubiquitously deployed on each gHN of a gCube infrastructure.
gCube Hosting Node (gHN)
The topological unit of a gCube infrastructure. An abstraction over a container running on a given port and hosting at least a minimal set of basic gCube services (the local services) dedicated to the host management.
gCube Task
A functionally unconstrained bodies of code that lack a network interface but can be dynamically deployed into the Executor service and executed through its interface.
gLite
gLite (pronounced "gee-lite") is a middleware for Grid computing. Born as a part of the EGEE Project, gLite provides a bleeding-edge, best-of-breed framework for building Grid applications tapping into the power of distributed computing and storage resources across the Internet.
Service
A standalone executable piece of software that offer its functionality to other executable software. Services do not involve human intervention for their execution and often adopt a technology independent communication protocol. Services can be locally ore remotely consumed and usually support network discovery and consumption.
Virtual Organisation
A Virtual Organisation (VO) is a dynamic pool of distributed resources shared in a trusted way by a dynamic set of users belonging to one or more organizations.
Virtual Research Environment (VRE)
An integrated and coordinated working environment providing participants with the resources (data, instruments, processing power, communication tools, etc.) they need to accomplish tasks. The resources shared can be of very different nature and vary across application and institutional domains. Usually they include content resources, application services that manipulate these content resources to produce new knowledge, and computational resources, which physically store the content and support the processing of the services.
From a system point of view, a VRE is a pool of gCubeResources dynamically aggregated to behave as a unit with respect to the application context the VRE is expected to serve. Each VRE is a view over the potentially unlimited pool of resources made available through the Infrastructure that (i) is regulated by the user community needs and the resources sharing policies and (ii) produces a new VO constraining the scope and usage of resources actors playing in the VRE are subject to.
Web Service
A software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network. It has an interface described in a machine-processable format (specifically WSDL). Other systems interact with the Web service in a manner prescribed by its description using SOAP-messages, typically conveyed using HTTP with an XML serialization in conjunction with other Web-related standards.
