Web Service Grids: an evolutionary approach

2003

We have discussed in several columns Grid technology and its use in e-Science (large scale distributed scientific research). Here we make the ideas more concrete by describing how one can “convert”(build from scratch) a scientific resource (program) as a web service. Modern Grids are built on top of web services with interesting refinements captured as OGSA–Open Grid Service Architecture. The approach here can easily be extended to be OGSA (with its initial OGSI standard) compliant [3].

The combination of Web Services and grid-computing technologies is currently of a major scientific revolution. It combines the middleware solution from Web Services and resource-sharing solutions of grid computing. We present a general framework based on Web Services and grid-based technologies for online laboratories. It is a distributed system model where computational resources and experimental devices throughout the networks are organized into federations. The benefits of this model are information processing capacity increase and resource sharing. We discuss a number of technical considerations using this framework. These include: the descriptions of tele-experimentation resources; the wrapping of instruments into a web service; the composition of Web Services, which is modeled as a planning problem, and; the design of an online laboratory brokerage system, which we dealt with in a former article. We also discuss some issues related to business logic and policy in a particular sector, such as tele-learning and network-supported research via information technologies. fills out the Web services stack to be consistent with the Open Grid Services Infrastructure (see next section). We expect that, in the future, the individual Web Services will have the properties of the current Grid Services.

2009 First Asian Himalayas International Conference on Internet, 2009

The heterogeneity of Grid resources (e.g. compute, storage, and network) that are geographically dispersed creates a fundamental challenge in terms of their discovery and monitoring process in production Grids today. In order to overcome these challenges, a wide variety of information models and services are developed that provide proprietary solutions in rather complex ways. Many of those services lack simplicity with respect to the setup, resource registration, maintenance, and security, thus making the information system complex and hard to use, especially in Grids driven by High Performance Computing (HPC) needs such as DEISA. In this paper we present a Common Information Service (CIS), which represents an information service, which aims to provide the functionality required to seamlessly aggregate and expose Grid resource information from various heterogeneous resources. The contribution of this paper is about using the emerging OGF GLUE2 standard information model for structuring Grid resource information in order to achieve the interoperability with other Grid technologies in general and other information systems in particular. Using this standard, our contribution provides insights of how CIS publishes and discovers resource and service information in the context of Web services based UNICORE Grids (e.g. DEISA, D-Grid) and highlights example deployments of the D-Mon project. Since the availability of upto-date information is essential for Grid interoperability, we furthermore provide insights of how CIS can be used to contribute to cross-Grid applications based on the Infrastructure Interoperability Reference Model (IIRM).

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.

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.

2004

Page 1. A Grid Application Framework based on Web Services Specifications and Practices Authors: Savas Parastatidis Jim Webber Paul Watson Thomas Rischbeck Copyright �� 2003 North East Regional e-Science Centre School of Computing Science University of Newcastle, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, NE1 7RU United Kingdom Page 2. Page 3.

2002

Abstract Recently, the Globus Project and IBM initiated a development effort to align Grid technologies with Web services technologies, using the Open Grid Services Architecture. OGSA enables the integration of services and resources across distributed, heterogeneous, dynamic environments and communities. To achieve this integration, the OGSA model adopts the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) and defines the Grid service concept.

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.