Customizable Web Service for Effcient Access to Distributed Nuclear Physics Relational Databases

An increasing fraction of the data generated in Nuclear and High-Energy Physics (HENP) is managed in distributed and relational databases. As the size of this data grows and the collaborative nature of HENP experiments increases, the ability to access di¿erently organized relational databases remotely, e¿ciently, and yet in a user-friendly and interoperable manner, is becoming very important. The HENP community lacks tools addressing this need and accommodating related challenges. This project will develop a customizable Web Service for e¿cient access to distributed Nuclear Physics (NP) databases. The system will consist of a generic Web Service for accessing arbitrary distributed relational databases, a reference client implemented for the Solenoidal Tracker at the RHIC (STAR) experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), and a tool for creation of the high-level and domain-speci¿c clients required by particular applications. The Phase I project implemented a generic customizable Web Service for accessing distributed relational databases while supplying the capability of multiple language bindings without signi¿cant user modi¿cations. The Phase II project will continue to build on the existing prototype and incorporate several additional modern computer science technologies. It will develop auto-caching mechanisms for increasing the e¿ective system performance and provide on-demand resource allocation tools to meet growing data demands e¿ciently. Commercial Applications and other Benefits as described by the awardee: Relational databases are widely used in commercial applications (pharmaceutical drug trials, transactions in banking and ¿nancial trading, credit history and fraud detection, consumer ¿churn¿ in subscriber businesses (cell phone, cable TV), among others). The tools developed in this project will also be made available to the High Energy and Nuclear Physics community, as well as other scienti¿c domains.