XSPEED

Coordinator: Barry Kavanagh, e-mail: Barry.kavanagh (at) dajeil.com

Involved countries: Ireland, Spain, Turkey

Abstract

XSPEED will revolutionise XML processing for Service Oriented Computing (SOC) applications by defining, implementing and evaluating an interface to enable these applications to take advantage of XML processing hardware sub-systems currently in existence or likely to emerge in the future.  SOC uses XML messages to transfer information between web services over the enterprise service bus (ESB). A significant barrier to the adoption of SOC is the computing resource required to deliver effective, efficient and secure solutions in XML processing. 

IBM and Intel have stated recently that this requires special purpose hardware.  Dajeil is the only company in Europe producing special purpose hardware for XML acceleration, and one of a small number of such companies worldwide. Although there are XML appliances using general-purpose processors available on the market, the nature of such network-connected devices renders them unsuitable for accelerating many applications.  As yet, standard interfaces to allow SOC take advantage of specialist acceleration hardware have not been defined, with consequent uncertainties for further hardware design and for companies needing to use this technology to implement SOC efficiently and securely. We believe that Europe can take a leadership position both in the design of XML hardware and in the effective use of SOC if an appropriate interface standard can be defined and tested in the next two years. 

There is an environmental spin-off benefit from this technology, in that less general purpose servers will be required to deliver the same processing capability. This provides an energy saving and is thus a  more environmentally friendly solution.  XSPEED brings together a consortium of academic, SME and large companies qualified to address the project requirements. Dajeil, the project coordinator, is expert in the XML processing hardware technology. Dublin City University, the research partner, will test the theoretical completeness of the interface specification and its implementation. Telefónica and iSOCO will integrate the technology into a public administration / professional body workflow product which uses extensive XML and Security functions providing an ideal platform for test on multiple end-user sites. Cybersoft will deploy the technology in a financial services application to be tested in a real-life situation within the Turkish Central Registry Agency (MKK).

At the base of service oriented systems XML messages are exchanged between different web services. This project will provide an enabling technology for the deployment and adoption of service oriented architectures by eliminating some of the security and processing barriers associated with the CPU intensive processing of XML messages. NESSI identifies the adoption of Service Oriented Business Models as a fundamental shift that is necessary to change the European economy into the world�s most dynamic and competitive knowledge-based society. This project is closely aligned with the strategic research agenda of NESSI.

The stated mission of the NESSI SOA working group includes under the heading Inherently Stable and Safe Architectures: Research, identify, and document principles and architectures that confer a high degree of stability, predictability, and trust to infrastructures and related deployed systems when considered from an end-to-end perspective. The XSPEED project proposes just such an architecture. NEM strategic research agenda include the enabling technologies of Security and Privacy, and Middleware. XSPEED is an enabling technology for both as described in this proposal. A Panlab implementation of XSPEED will be provided to establish integration, testing, validation/verification and possibly certification services for product prototypes of other European collaborative projects.