ASSIST is a long-term research program of our group. ASSIST is a programming environment aimed at providing parallel programmers with user-friendly, efficient, portable, fast ways of implementing parallel applications.

It follows on a path of research on structured parallel languages that has lead to several scientific and technical results, including the development of the P3L and SkIE parallel programming languages and the muskel parallel-skeleton class library.

ASSIST includes a skeleton based parallel programming language (ASSISTcl, where cl stands for coordination language) and a set of compiling tools and run time libraries. ASSIST development and research on the computational model currently go on as a support activity of several of the research projects our group is involved in.

ASSIST evolution led to the introduction in the language and in its environment of several key properties for Grid awareness and deploy-ability of applications, e.g.: component orientation, interoperability with standard framework, fail tolerance, monitoring and adaptiveness.

Grid.it is a strategic project in the area of Enabling Technologies for the Information Society, coordinated by the Italian National Research Council.

The project has a strong interdisciplinary character and is aimed at defining, implementing and applying innovative solutions for networked computing-enabling platforms, oriented towards scalable virtual organisations and based on the 'Grid Computing' paradigm.

The research topics in the project span from high performance photonic networks to innovative middleware services, high performance programming environments and so forth.

Within the Grid.it project, our group coordinates the Work Package 8 (High-performance Component-based Programming Environments), which is currently developing a Grid-enabled, High-Performance component framework based on features from the ASSIST HPC environment, from well-established conventional component frameworks and from upcoming Grid and HPC standards like Web/Grid Services and CCA components.

Other research groups of our C.S. Department work in the WP6 of the project, Knowledge Services for Intensive Data Analysis.
Scientific Coordinator: Marco Vanneschi, Università di Pisa, Italy.
Starting date: January 2003. Duration: 3 years.

GridCoord is a Special Support Action (SSA) of the Sixth Framework Programme of the European Community.

The Goal is the Co-ordination of European Initiatives and research activities in Grid Computing in order to strengthen co-operation among the funding agencies planning future activities, to enhance collaboration between the research and user communities, and to develop visionary national and EU programmes and roadmaps enabling Europe to play a leadership role in Grid technologies and applications.
Scientific Coordinator: Marco Vanneschi, Università di Pisa, Italy.
Starting date: July 2004. Duration: 18 months.

CoreGRID is a Network of Excellence in the area of Grid and Peer-to-Peer technologies that will allow European researchers to carry out a joint program of activities at an unprecedented level with the aim of developing next-generation grid middleware.
Scientific Coordinator: Thierry Priol, INRIA, France.
Starting date: September 2004. Duration: 4 years.

Project SFIDA (Information Science Solutions for Supply-Chains, Districts and Associations of Small and Medium Enterprises, co-funded by the Italian Government) aims at developing a GRID-based inter-operability platform able to support next generation Supply Chain Management applications, specifically addressing the needs of SMEs (Small-Medium Enterprises) belonging to industrial districts and dynamic supply networks.

Next generation SCM (Supply Chain Management) applications are intended in SFIDA to be based on componentization (e-services), intelligence (data mining), collaboration (c-business) and customer business-processes orientation. The platform and the next generation SCM applications running on top of it will be tested in various typical industrial cases, spanning from automotive, textile, food, white goods and media retail.

The aim of the SAIB project is the development of a technological infrastructure to support Internet-based financial applications. Being an industrial research project, SAIB includes both research activities and prototype design and development. The project is led by Atos Origin (formerly Schlumberger-Sema), and the C.S. Department is one of the main contractors.

Our laboratory applied our experiences on High Performance Programming Environments to develop two parallel subsystems

• a High Performance Customer Profiling module, which integrates Data Mart and Data Mining facilities with the work-flow kernel of the SAIB prototype; both kind of functionalities are provided by a portable and expandable software architecture which exploits parallel computation and parallel I/O in order to enhance performance;
• a High Performance Web Server module based on industrial standard technology, exploiting load balancing among servers and cluster-distributed shared-memory caching of web objects to ensure high throughput of the SAIB web interface.

Project Leader: Pietro Schiavina Lodi (Atos Origin)
Scientific Coordinators: Pietro Schiavina Lodi (Atos Origin), Marco Vanneschi (Università di Pisa), Angelo Raffaele Meo (Politecnico di Torino)
Starting date: March 2001. Duration: 3,5 years.

Ambiente di programmazione portabile a componenti parallele e Componenti ad alte Prestazioni per Data/Web Mining e Motori di Ricerca.

Two of the tasks of the project were located at our department.

In Task A (Portable Programming Environment based upon Parallel Components) the research product consist in a programming environment suitable for architecture independent HPC applications, supporting the integration of a parallel context with standard tools for sequential distributed systems.

The methodology is based on the integration of parallel and component based programming. Applications are developed in the RTS (both interpreted and compiled) that optimise performances according to the underlying architecture. The architecture is based on distributed Object systems such as CORBA, DCOM, JavaBeans as well as GRID run time systems (Globus) with parallel processing nodes.

In Task B (High-performance components for Data/Web Mining and Search Engines) the goal is to realize, on top of Task A support level, parallel component-based, specialized environments for extracting and searching information and knowledge from structured and semi-structured sources (Web), as well as for utilizing the extracted information in Question Answering and general Problem Solving environments.
National Scientific Coordinator: Marco Vanneschi (Università di Pisa)
Local Coordinator: Marco Danelutto (Università di Pisa)
Starting date: 2003. Duration: 2 years.

The project aims to study, evaluate, and exploit grid computing technologies for the development of a new generation of scientific and business applications. A further goal is creating a kernel of people skilled on this emerging research topic.

Our research unit was responsible of the line on Programming Environments, whose aim was the realization of an innovative environment for the development of high-performance applications on computational Grids. The programming model is based upon the joining of component / object technology and of structured parallel programming technology.
National Scientific Coordinator: Domenico Laforenza (ISTI/CNR, Pisa)
Local Coordinator: Marco Vanneschi (Università di Pisa)
Starting date: 2002. Duration: 2 years.

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