A collaborative e-Science architecture towards a virtual research environment

This paper presents a novel Collaborative e-Science Architecture (CeSA) to address two challenging issues in e-Science that have arisen from the management of heterogeneous distributed environments. By combining the capabilities of peer-to-peer and Grid computing, the architecture provides an environment for scientific collaborations within distributed, loosely coupled research communities and brings computation and data intensive resources to the desktops of the scientists in these communities. The Reaction Kinetics research community had been used as a case study to capture realistic requirements. A prototype based on the architecture was developed for user experiment and evaluation. The results of these experiments were promising. It has provided further motivation to evolve CeSA towards a Virtual Research Environment.