GridSpaces™: Dynamic Spaces for Runtime Composition of Grid Services

Despite major technical advances, the ability to “mix and match” disparate complex systems (e.g., live, virtual, constructive simulations) continues to pose a major challenge to DoD in general and MDA in particular. Today MDA believes that transformational advances in interoperability and integration have become possible with the advent of enterprise computing, web services, semantic technologies and grid computing. MDA is looking to harnessing these technologies in a synergistic fashion to achieve rapid fielding of interoperable, distributed systems for testing, analyses and training. With these objectives in mind, the MDA has specified a broad range of requirements such as advanced time management for data synchronization, scaleability of the O(104) entities, HLA-compliance, effective operation within the Global Information Grid, client-server authentication and secure communication, including “thin-client” approaches to conserve host computing, storage and communication resources. Phase I of this effort will develop a system design for a scalable integration framework that enables rapid interoperability among disparate systems through the use of a subset of these transformational technologies and demonstrate secure operation through a proof-of-concept prototype spanning at least two client systems. The prototype architecture will be designed for extensibility and scalability to larger system configurations.