In both e-business and e-science, we often need to integrate services across distributed, heterogeneous, dynamic “virtual organizations” formed from the disparate resources within a single enterprise and/or from external resource sharing and service provider relationships. This integration can be technically challenging because of the need to achieve various qualities of service when running on top of different native platforms. We present an Open Grid Services Architecture that addresses these challenges. Building on concepts and technologies from the Grid and Web services communities, this architecture defines a uniform exposed service semantics (the Grid service); defines standard mechanisms for creating, naming, and discovering transient Grid service instances; provides location transparency and multiple protocol bindings for service instances; and supports integration with underlying native platform facilities. The Open Grid Services Architecture also defines, in terms of Web Services Description Language (WSDL) interfaces and associated conventions, mechanisms required for creating and composing sophisticated distributed systems, including lifetime management, change management, and notification. Service bindings can support reliable invocation, authentication, authorization, and delegation, if required. Our presentation complements an earlier foundational article, “The Anatomy of the Grid,” by describing how Grid mechanisms can implement a service-oriented architecture, explaining how Grid functionality can be incorporated into a Web services framework, and illustrating how our architecture can be applied within commercial computing as a basis for distributed system integration—within and across organizational domains. This is a DRAFT document and continues to be revised. The latest version can be found at http://www.globus.org/research/papers/ogsa.pdf. Please send comments to foster@mcs.anl.gov, carl@isi.edu, jnick@us.ibm.com, tuecke@mcs.anl.gov Physiology of the Grid 2

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The Physiology of the Grid An Open Grid Services Architecture for Distributed Systems Integration

National Institute of Standards and Technology における超伝導研究及び生活

Cloud computing systems fundamentally provide access to large pools of data and computational resources through a variety of interfaces similar in spirit to existing grid and HPC resource management and programming systems.  These types of systems offer a new programming target for scalable application developers and have gained popularity over the past few years.  However, most cloud computing systems in operation today are proprietary, rely upon infrastructure that is invisible to the research community, or are not explicitly designed to be instrumented and modified by systems researchers. In this work, we present Eucalyptus -- an open-source software framework for cloud computing that implements what is commonly referred to as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS); systems that give users the ability to run and control entire virtual machine instances deployed across a variety physical resources. We outline the basic principles of the Eucalyptus design, detail important operational aspects of the system, and discuss architectural trade-offs that we have made in order to allow Eucalyptus to be portable, modular and simple to use on infrastructure commonly found within academic settings.  Finally, we provide evidence that Eucalyptus enables users familiar with existing Grid and HPC systems to explore new cloud computing functionality while maintaining access to existing, familiar application development software and Grid middle-ware.

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The Eucalyptus Open-Source Cloud-Computing System

https://physique.cuso.ch/fileadmin/physique/document/2005_vanStokkum_lecturenotes.pdf

Global and target analysis of time-resolved spectra

The Grid 2: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure

The growing synergy between Web Services and Grid-based technologies will potentially enable profound, dynamic interactions between scientific applications dispersed in geographic, institutional, and conceptual space. Such deep interoperability requires the simplicity, robustness, and extensibility for which SOAP was conceived, thus making it a natural lingua franca. Concomitant with these advantages, however is a degree of inefficiency that may limit the applicability of SOAP to some situations. We investigate the limitations of SOAP for high-performance scientific computing. We analyze the processing of SOAP messages, and identify the issues of each stage. We present a high-performance SOAP implementation and a schema-specific parser based on the results of our investigation. After our SOAP optimizations are implemented, the most significant bottleneck is ASCII/double conversion. Instead of handling this using extensions to SOAP we recommend a multiprotocol approach that uses SOAP to negotiate faster binary protocols between messaging participants.

Investigating the limits of SOAP performance for scientific computing

Computational Grids [17,25] 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) [1,2,3,8], 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 [52] 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.

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Programming the Grid: Distributed Software Components, P2P and Grid Web Services for Scientific Applications

Describes an approach to building a distributed software component system for scientific and engineering applications that is based on representing Computational Grid services as application-level software components. These Grid services provide tools such as registry and directory services, event services and remote component creation. While a service-based architecture for grids and other distributed systems is not new, this framework provides several unique features. First, the public interfaces to each software component are described as XML documents. This allows many adaptors and user interfaces to be generated from the specification dynamically. Second, this system is designed to exploit the resources of existing Grid infrastructures like Globus and Legion, and commercial Internet frameworks like e-speak. Third, and most important, the component-based design extends throughout the system. Hence, tools such as application builders, which allow users to select components, start them on remote resources, and connect and execute them, are also interchangeable software components. Consequently, it is possible to build distributed applications using a graphical "drag-and-drop" interface, a Web-based interface, a scripting language like Python, or an existing tool such as Matlab.

A component based services architecture for building distributed applications

This issue's theme is the rapidly evolving enabling technology of problem-solving environments, defined as "a computer system that provides all the computational facilities necessary to solve a target class of problems" for scientific computing. The 1991 and 1995 workshops on PSEs for physical simulation helped to define this research area and highlight the pertinent research issues. The first workshop made several recommendations that led to the 1995 NSF initiative on PSEs. These efforts have identified several PSE design goals together with approaches for realizing them

Problem-solving Environments For Computational Science

Distributed software component architectures provide promising approach to the problem of building large scale, scientific Grid applications [18]. Communication in these component architectures is based on Remote Method Invocation (RMI) protocols that allow one software component to invoke the functionality of another. Examples include Java remote method invocation (Java RMI)[25] and the new Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) [15]. SOAP has the advantage that many programming languages and component frameworks can support it. This paper describes experiments showing that SOAP by itself is not efficient enough for large scale scientific applications. However, when it is embedded in multi-protocol RMI framework, SOAP can be effectively used as a universal control protocol, that can be swapped out by faster, more special purpose protocols when large data transfer speeds are needed.

Randall Bramley

Papers

Investigating the limits of SOAP performance for scientific computing

Programming the Grid: Distributed Software Components, P2P and Grid Web Services for Scientific Applications

A component based services architecture for building distributed applications

Problem-solving Environments For Computational Science

Requirements for and Evaluation of RMI Protocols for Scientific Computing