Special Issue: Grids and Web Services for e-Science

2005

Large scientific collaborations are moving towards service oriented architectures for implementation and deployment of globally distributed systems. Clarens is a high performance, easy to deploy Web Service framework that supports the construction of such globally distributed systems. This paper discusses some of the core functionality of Clarens that the authors believe is important for building distributed systems based on Web Services that support scientific analysis.

2007

Abstract. Grids are built by communities who need a shared cyberinfrastructure to make progress on the critical problems they are currently confronting. A Grid portal is a conventional Web portal that sits on top of a rich collection of web services that allow a community of users access to shared data and application resources without exposing them to the details of Grid computing. In this chapter we describe a service-oriented architecture to support this type of portal.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2007

An e-Science Grid Gateway is a portal that allows a scientific collaboration to use the resources of a Grid in a way that frees them from the complex details of Grid software and middleware. The goal of such a gateway is to allow the users access to community data and applications that can be used in the language of their science. Each user has a private data and metadata space, access to data provenance and tools to use or compose experimental workflows that combine standard data analysis, simulation and post-processing tools. In this talk we will describe the underlying Grid service architecture for such an eScience gateway. In this paper we will describe some of the challenges that confront the design of Grid Gateways and we will outline a few new research directions.

Cluster Computing, 2002

Computational Grids [Grid, have become an important asset in large-scale scientific and engineering research. By providing a set of services that allow a widely distributed collection of resources to be tied together into a relatively seamless computing framework, teams of researchers can collaborate to solve problems that they could not have attempted before. Unfortunately the task of building Grid applications remains extremely difficult because there are few tools available to support developers. To build reliable and re-usable Grid applications, programmers must be equipped with a programming framework that hides the details of most Grid services and allows the developer a consistent, non-complex model in which applications can be composed from well tested, reliable sub-units. This paper describes experiences with using a software component framework for building Grid applications. The framework, which is based on the DOE Common Component Architecture (CCA) [CCA, CCAT, CCA1,CCA2], allows individual components to export function/service interfaces that can be remotely invoked by other components. The framework also provides a simple messaging/event system for asynchronous notification between application components. The paper also describes how the emerging Web-Services [WSDL] model fits with a component-oriented application design philosophy. To illustrate the connection between web services and Grid application programming we describe a simple design pattern for application factory services which can be used to simplify the task of building reliable Grid programs. Finally we address several issues of Grid programming that better understood from the perspective of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems. In particular we describe how models for collaboration and resource sharing fit well with many grid application scenarios.

Proceedings of the …, 2005

Web Service architectures have gained popularity in recent years because they allow software and services from various organizations to be combined easily to provide integrated and distributed applications. However, most applications developed and used by scientific communities are not Web Service oriented and there is a growing need to integrate them into Grid applications based on Web Service architectures. But are scientific communities willing to rewrite each of their applications as a Web Service? Do they want to write complex software to manage user authentication and authorization? Do they want to write complex interfaces between applications to manage interactions between them? Can they afford to keep up with rapidly changing service-oriented technologies today? What they do want is to be able to do experiments of ever increasing complexity using scientific workflows. In this paper we describe a framework that allows scientists to wrap their existing applications as Web Services without having to write any extra code or modify their applications in any way. The framework also allows scientists, educational users and other users to discover these application services, interact with them and compose scientific workflows from the convenience of a Grid Portal.

Concurrency and …, 2005