What is Collaborative e-Science Architecture

Supporting global scientific collaborations are becoming more important due to the increasing complexity of modern scientific problems as well as the need for sharing specialized expensive instruments and huge amount of data required for solving these problems. The combination of Grid computing and Web-based architecture has been a common technological architecture employed to address the need for an integrated environment for scientific collaborations. However, this approach is subjected to a certain level of centralized administration and control. This has been seen as inflexible and does not scale well with respect to the heterogeneity of distributed user communities. This chapter introduces an orchestration of P2P and Grid computing for supporting distributed scientific collaborations. In the resulted architecture, a P2P collaborative environment is used for heterogeneous users to collaborate and tap into large-scale computational resources and experimental datasets in the Grid computing environment. The service oriented architecture is used as a means of integrating these two environments.