Wrap scientific applications as WSRF grid services using gRAVI

Abstract

Web service models are increasingly being used in the Grid community as way to create distributed applications exposing data and/or applications through self describing interfaces. Scientific research is one key field in which the benefits are apparent as individual services can be orchestrated into experimental workflows that model the research process and facilitate verification and extension. However, many applications are not web enabled and the task of creating services from scratch is cumbersome in part due to the range of complex technologies, tools, standards and languages involved. In this paper we present gRAVI, a WSRF Web service wrapping tool that allows scientists to rapidly expose applications, scripts and workflows as Web services. gRAVI generated services include GSI security, Grid scheduling, state notifications, persistence and data staging. All service code, scripts and definition files are created automatically without any developer input. gRAVI services are created in standard Grid Archive files and are able to be moved and deployed to any compliant container with no requirement for any gRAVI or Grid infrastructure on the target machine. gRAVI supports deployment to the open science cloud Nimbus, whilst also being able to parse Taverna workflow definition files to create strongly typed services. © 2009 IEEE.