Building grid applications and portals: An approach based on components, web services and workflow tools

Abstract

Large scale Grid applications are often composed a distributed collection of parallel simulation codes, instrument monitors, data miners, rendering and visualization tools. For example, consider a severe storm prediction system driven by a grid of weather sensors. Typically these applications are very complex to build, so users interact with them through a Grid portal front end. This talk outlines an approach based on a web service component architecture for building these applications and portal interfaces. We illustrate how the traditional parallel application can be wrapped by a web service factory and integrated into complex workflows. Additional issues that are addressed include: grid security, web service tools and workflow composition tools. The talk will try to outline several important classes of unsolved problems and possible new research directions for building grid applications. © Springer-Verlag 2004.