MIDDLEWARE

It is a great pleasure to introduce the ACM/IEEE/IFIP Middleware Workshop Program for Grenoble 2005. This is the fourth time that Middleware has included a Workshop Program, and the levels of interest and the standard of submissions continue to be extremely high. This year we have five workshops. The Workshop on Adaptive and Reflective Middleware (ARM05) is our most venerable institution, and is now in its fourth incarnation, having started out at Middleware 2000 in New York and run at every Middleware since. Two of the other workshops are also well established, having run previously in Rio and Toronto. These are the Workshop on Middleware for Grid Computing (MGC05), and the Workshop on Middleware for Pervasive and Ad-hoc Computing (MPAC05). MPAC this year is joined by Didier Donsez and his team whose proposal for a workshop on 'Middleware for Sensor-Based Services' has been merged into MPAC. As a consequence, this event is running over two days rather than the usual one day.

Another workshop that is continuing a lively tradition is the Doctoral Symposium on Middleware. This popular event has worked particularly well in the past and represents a wonderful opportunity for young reseachers in our field to present their work to a mock thesis committee of mentors and to receive valuable and supportive feeback. This year we also have a new workshop: the 1st Workshop on Aspect Oriented Middleware Development (AOMD05). This highlights what seems to be a promising area of synergistic research that has recently been receiving a lot of attention. We look forward to a productive dialogue on the relationship between aspectisation techniques and middleware techniques.

In order to control a broad base of resources, Grid Computing has a middleware layer controlling the allocation of resources and the distributed execution of applications. By exploring the possibility of a wider range of applications specially based on data grids and content networks, a larger diversity of resources and devices can be thought participating in a grid system.

The first MGC workshop held on June 2003, in conjunction with the Middleware Conference, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, MGC'2003, saw a variety of efforts in Middleware for Grid Computing. There were 16 technical presentations and discussions on several stimulating topics including, Classic Grids, Object Oriented technologies, Service-based Grids, Open grid Service Architecture, Agent Grid, Interactive Grid, Grid Economy / Scheduling, and Portlets. Following the workshop, extended and thoroughly revised versions of the papers were invited to a Special Issue of Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience Journal published in 2004.

The 2nd workshop in the MGC series brought together researches in the field of middleware for grid computing, addressing topics that emerged from 2003, and some novel ones such as, Strategies and Protocols for obtaining Quality of Services, Virtualization, Wireless Grids, Data Grid Middleware, Semantic Grid Middleware, Dependability and Fault Tolerance in Grid Middleware and Managing Information. This workshop received an unprecedented number of high-quality submissions. Fifteen full papers and nine posters were chosen for the workshop proceedings out of the forty-eight papers originally submitted. The presenters highlighted issues and solutions in one or more of the themes identified for the workshop. Following the second workshop, thoroughly revised selected papers were invited to a Special Issue of Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience Journal to appear in 2005/2006.

MGC'2003 and MGC'2004, generated substantial interest in the community and it is expected that this interest will continue. Far from exhausting the topics of interest, they have paved the way for a third edition of the workshop in the series. For MGC 2005 workshop, researchers from the various GRID middleware communities were encouraged to submit and present original work to be considered for publication.

The goal of the third edition of the MGC workshop is to bring together researches in the field of middleware, addressing large-scale and real world problems in grid environments, including the most interesting and stimulating topics emerged last year, and some novel ones as Strategies and Protocols for obtaining Quality of Services, Virtualization, Wireless Grids, Data Grid Middleware, Semantic Grid Middleware, Dependability and Fault Tolerance in Grid Middleware and Managing Information.

The third workshop received a good number of high-quality submissions and sixteen papers were selected for these proceedings out of the thirty-eight originally submitted. Additionally 4 posters have been invited. The presenters highlight issues and solutions in one or more of the themes identified for the workshop.

As full papers there were contributions on <i>Dependability and Fault Tolerance in Grid Middleware</i> by Camargo, Cerqueira and Kon, presenting strategies for storage of checkpointing data using non-dedicated repositories on grid systems. On <i>Service Discovery</i> there was a contribution by Banerjee et al., exploring scalable grid service discovery based on UDDI. On <i>Portals</i> there was a paper by Akram, Chohan and Allan. Addressing <i>Peer to Peer Protocols in Grid Computing</i> there were papers by Amoretti, Zanichelli and Conte, Lima et al., and Santos et al. They present a service-oriented framework for P2P-based grids, a peer-to-peer resource discovery in mobile grids, and an accurate autonomous accounting in peer-to-peer grids. Exploring different topics and common issues related to <i>Programming Models and Tools in Grid Middleware</i> by Goldchleger, Godlman and Hayashida, Paventhan and Takeda, and Rodriguez, Milanes and Schulze. They focus on a BSP parallel computing model implementation, on a mutli-language CoG toolkit, and on managing jobs with an interpreted language for dynamic adaptation. Addressing aspects on <i>Agent-based Approaches and Grid Application Frameworks</i> there were papers by Joita et al., d'Orazio et al., and Desertot, Escoffier and Donsez. They explore an application deployment using grid middleware, the building of adaptable cache services, and autonomic management of J2EE edge servers. On <i>Resource Management and Scheduling</i> there were papers by Yarmolenko and Sakellariou, Vargas et al., and Boeres et al. They discuss aspects on the flexibility of WS-agreement for job submission, on a hierarchical submission in a grid environment, and on hierarchical self-scheduling for MPI applications executing in computational grids.

Additionally there were poster contributions by Lima et al., and Yamin et al. on <i>Programming Models and Tools in Grid Middleware</i>, focusing on a framework for building customized grid environments and a middleware to support pervasive grid applications. Pathak, and Bittencourt et al. present posters on commons issues on <i>Resource Management and Scheduling</i>, focusing on dynamic resource management on the grid and a path clustering heuristic for scheduling task graphs onto a grid.