Cloud and Local Servers for a Federation of Molecular Science Learning Object Repositories

The G-Lorep project of the European Chemistry Thematic Network (ECTN), based on a federation of distributed repositories of Molecular Science Learning Objects, leverages at present a “hybrid” centralized/distributed architecture in which the central node hosts a shared database. The shared database deals only with the task of managing metadata to the end of synchronizing the information made available to the federation members at regular time intervals. In order to avoid missed synchronization (in the case of the failure of the central node) a scheme distributing the nodes, adopting a PaaS (Platform as a Service) strategy and ensuring network security, is implemented and related performances are evaluated. The efficiency of the developed new architecture of the federation is measured for a set of Molecular Science Learning Objects developed within some European distributed computing initiatives and adopted for the Theoretical Chemistry and Computational Modeling European Master and Doctoral joint courses. The evolution of the proposed Learning Objects is discussed also in view of the development of the Molecular Simulator Enabled Cloud Services (MOSEX) pilot project.