We will develop a set of services to support group-based project
management. In the context of the VLab, the project manager will provide
users or groups with a unified view of projects that typically involve
hundreds (if not thousands) of jobs generating large amounts of data while
running on distributed computers perhaps in two continents. Metadata will
be needed in the system to represent running processes, data files,
visualization output, etc. The project manager is composed of two parts:
1) a service that manages metadata, responds to user commands, etc, and 2)
a collection of user interfaces that present the user with all the
information necessary to accomplish his/her research. Multiple clients
working on a single project will require that their interfaces be
synchronized. This leads to the notion of cached metadata, dirty caches,
etc. We will investigate various approaches to cache coherency and adapt
them to the user interface synchronization. We extend upon on earlier work
by providing the concept of the collaborative project of shared, group
accessible metadata using our unified messaging infrastructure. (Pierce
and Erlebacher)
