GREDIA: Grid enabled access to rich media content

Overview

GREDIA is an FP6 project funded by the European Union.

Our team, as technical coordinators and Grid technology experts, is developing a a generic middle-ware platform, based on our proposed service-oriented architecture, RDLS (Rich Data Location Services) , which enables efficient content management in Grid environments. RDLS can be efficiently integrated in existing Grid middlewares, such as Globus Toolkit 4, as it complies with WSRF, a standard posed by the Open Grid Forum.

Our design introduces concepts from Peer-to-Peer and distributed computing in order to provide a scalable and reliable infrastructure for storage, search and retrieval of annotated multimedia content.

To ensure fast searching of media in the distributed repositories of a Virtual Organization, our system incorporates a multidimensional indexing scheme, which serves the need for supporting both point and range queries over a set of meta-data attributes.

Finally, multimedia file transfers are conducted using GridTorrent, a grid-enabled, Peer-to-Peer mechanism that allows the aggregate data transfer throughput to scale and effectively copes with flash crowds. GridTorrent has backward compatibility with the file transfer utility GridFTP, which is adopted by the Grid community.

Publications

• A. Asiki, K. Doka, I. Konstantinou, A. Zissimos and N. Koziris, "A Distributed Architecture for Multi-dimensional Indexing and Data Retrieval in Grid Environments," in Proceedings of the Cracow 07 Grid Workshop, Cracow, Poland, October 2007