Lukasz Czekierda
Katedra Informatyki AGH

     Architecture of a Distributed Environment for Organization
   and Execution of Experiments in Virtual Laboratory

Remote control of real devices is a quite popular activity these days. Fast
and quite reliable computer networks seem to be suitable to perform such
activities for scientific research, training and entertainment. There are many
environments called virtual laboratories, which allow people to use real
devices (as well as their simulators) and perform experiments.
One of the most important disadvantages of majority of contemporary virtual
laboratories is the fact that the features available to the users are
extremely limited; they are not able to make a full use of the accessible
equipment. The reason is a lack of a correct architecture of these
laboratories.

The goal of the lecture is to present the architecture of the Virtual
Laboratory created in Distributed Systems Research Group at Department of
Computer Science of AGH-UST. The important issue of the platform is the usage
of the most complex and sophisticated component technology â?" CORBA Component
Model (CCM) â?" and its integration with workflow and portal environments into
one consistent multilayer architecture. Remote users of the Virtual Laboratory
can develop, configure, deploy and execute both batched and interactive
experiments by themselves. The concept and architecture were practically
verified by creating a prototype instance of the Laboratory â?" Multimedia
Virtual Laboratory.