Title: A parallel grid-based implementation for real-time processing of event log data of collaborative applications

Authors: Fatos Xhafa, Claudi Paniagua, Leonard Barolli, Santi Caballe

Addresses: Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, Birkbeck, University of London, 23-29 Emerald Street, London WC1N 3QS, UK. ' IBM GTS, Virtualization and Grid Computing, Avd. Diagonal, 571 08029, Barcelona, Spain. ' Faculty of Information Engineering, Department of Information and Communication Engineering, Fukuoka Institute of Technology (FIT), 3-30-1 Wajiro-higashi, Higashi-ku, Fukuoka 811-0295, Japan. ' Department of Information Sciences, Open University of Catalonia, Av. Tibidabo, 39-43, 08035 Barcelona, Spain

Abstract: Collaborative applications usually register user interaction in the form of semi-structured plain text event log data. Extracting and structuring of data is a prerequisite for later key processes such as the analysis of interactions, assessment of group activity, or the provision of awareness and feedback. Yet, in real situations of online collaborative activity, the processing of log data is usually done offline since structuring event log data is, in general, a computationally costly process and the amount of log data tends to be very large. Techniques to speed and scale up the structuring and processing of log data with minimal impact on the performance of the collaborative application are thus desirable to be able to process log data in real time. In this paper, we present a parallel grid-based implementation for processing in real time the event log data generated in collaborative applications. Our results show the feasibility of using grid middleware to speed and scale up the process of structuring and processing semi-structured event log data. The Grid prototype follows the Master–Worker (MW) paradigm. It is implemented using the Globus Toolkit (GT) and is tested on the Planetlab platform.

Keywords: computational grids; grid services; real-time applications; parallel grid; grid computing; event log data; collaboration; online collaborative activity; grid middleware.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWGS.2010.033788

International Journal of Web and Grid Services, 2010 Vol.6 No.2, pp.124 - 140

Published online: 30 Jun 2010 *

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