Business Grid Services

Grid services have come to represent the synthesis of web services and grid computing paradigms. Web services provide the means to modularize software, enabling loosely coupled and novel synthesis. Grid computing removes the binding between functional software components and specific hosting hardware, enabling software to be deployed dynamically over a network (e.g. intra-, extra- or inter-net). Applying the constructs of grid computing to the service orientation of enterprise software will allow business service networks to utilize more specialized services. An upper service ontology that enables business grid services to be described and then related to the grid hosting platform is presented. Explicit knowledge is required for enterprise software, hosting servers and the domain that can then be utilized by both SLA and reservation systems. The ontology presented is derived from and validated using a collection of web services taken from leading investment banks

Enterprise application reuse: Semantic discovery of business grid services

Web services have emerged as a prominent paradigm for the development of distributed software systems as they provide the potential for software to be modularized in a way that functionality can be described, discovered and deployed in a platform independent manner over a network (e.g., intranets, extranets and the Internet). This paper examines an extension of this paradigm to encompass ‘Grid Services’, which enables software capabilities to be recast with an operational focus and support a heterogeneous mix of business software and data, termed a Business Grid - "the grid of semantic services". The current industrial representation of services is predominantly syntactic however, lacking the fundamental semantic underpinnings required to fulfill the goals of any semantically-oriented Grid. Consequently, the use of semantic technology in support of business software heterogeneity is investigated as a likely tool to support a diverse and distributed software inventory and user. Service discovery architecture is therefore developed that is (a) distributed in form, (2) supports distributed service knowledge and (3) automatically extends service knowledge (as greater descriptive precision is inferred from the operating application system). This discovery engine is used to execute several real-word scenarios in order to develop and test a framework for engineering such grid service knowledge. The examples presented comprise software components taken from a group of Investment Banking systems. Resulting from the research is a framework for engineering servic

Grid service orchestration using the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL)

Modern scientific applications often need to be distributed across grids. Increasingly applications rely on services, such as job submission, data transfer or data portal services. We refer to such services as grid services. While the invocation of grid services could be hard coded in theory, scientific users want to orchestrate service invocations more flexibly. In enterprise applications, the orchestration of web services is achieved using emerging orchestration standards, most notably the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL). We describe our experience in orchestrating scientific workflows using BPEL. We have gained this experience during an extensive case study that orchestrates grid services for the automation of a polymorph prediction application

Services Grids in Industry – On-Demand Provisioning and Allocation of Grid-Based Business Services

Over the last few years Grid computing has attracted considerable attention from the industry, because it offers opportunities for new on-demand business services for enterprises. In this article, we depict the current trend of enterprises to source Grid services offered by third-party utility providers on a use-on-demand, pay-per-use basis, thus leading to faster IT response to changing business needs. We outline the emerging expansion of Grid computing in industry and discuss the significant challenges still needing to be solved to further promote the adoption of Grid technology in the business domain

High-level grid application environment to use legacy codes as OGSA grid services

One of the biggest obstacles in the wide-spread industrial take-up of Grid technology is the existence of a large amount of legacy code that is not accessible as Grid services. The paper describes a new approach (GEMLCA: Grid Execution Management for Legacy Code Architecture) to deploy legacy codes as Grid services without modifying the original code. Moreover, we show a workflow execution oriented Grid portal technology (P-GRADE portal) by which such legacy code based Grid services can be applied in complex business processes. GEMLCA has been implemented as GT-3 services but can be easily ported into the new WSRF Grid standards

Dynamic Trust Federation in Grids

Grids are becoming economically viable and productive tools. Grids provide a way of utilizing a vast array of linked resources such as computing systems, databases and services online within Virtual Organizations (VO). However, today’s Grid architectures are not capable of supporting dynamic, agile federation across multiple administrative domains and the main barrier, which hinders dynamic federation over short time scales is security. Federating security and trust is one of the most significant architectural issues in Grids. Existing relevant standards and specifications can be used to federate security services, but do not directly address the dynamic extension of business trust relationships into the digital domain. In this paper we describe an experiment in which we highlight those challenging architectural issues and we will further describe how the approach that combines dynamic trust federation and dynamic authorization mechanism can address dynamic security trust federation in Grids. The experiment made with the prototype described in this paper is used in the NextGRID project for the definition of requirements for next generation Grid architectures adapted to business application need

Orchestrating Grid Services using BPEL and Globus Toolkit 4

Grid services exploit an emerging distributed computing technology that offers possibilities for distributed resource sharing and collaboration. The standards for WSRF (Web Service Resource Framework) have allowed grid services to converge more closely on web services. Composing web services has attracted significant effort and commercial interest. This has resulted in BPEL (Business Process Execution Logic) as a standard way of orchestrating web services. Because of the similarities with web services, there is a natural question of whether grid services can be orchestrated in like manner. It is explained how CRESS (Chisel Representation Employing Systematic Specification) has been extended to describe grid service composition. It will be seen how BPEL has been adapted for this purpose, using ActiveBPEL as the orchestration engine and Globus Toolkit 4 as the grid service container. The problems arising with orchestrating grid services are discussed, along with possible workarounds

Graphical Composition of Grid Services

Grid services and web services have similarities but also significant differences. Although conceived for web services, it is seen how BPEL (Business Process Execution Logic) can be used to orchestrate a collection of grid services. It is explained how CRESS (Chisel Representation Employing Systematic Specification) has been extended to describe grid service composition. The CRESS descriptions are automatically converted into BPEL/WSDL code for practical realisation of the composed services. This achieves orchestration of grid services deployed using the widely used Globus Toolkit and ActiveBPEL interpreter. The same CRESS descriptions are automatically translated into LOTOS, allowing systematic checks for interoperability and logical errors prior to implementation

EDOC: meeting the challenges of enterprise computing

An increasing demand for interoperable applications exists, sparking the real-time exchange of data across borders, applications, and IT platforms. To perform these tasks, enterprise computing now encompasses a new class of groundbreaking technologies such as Web services and service-oriented architecture (SOA); business process integration and management; and middleware support, like that for utility, grid, peer-to-peer, and autonomic computing. Enterprise computing also influences the processes for business modeling, consulting, and service delivery; it affects the design, development, and deployment of software architecture, as well as the monitoring and management of such architecture. As enterprises demand increasing levels of networked information and services to carry out business processes, IT professionals need conferences like EDOC to discuss emerging technologies and issues in enterprise computing. For these reasons, what started out as the Enterprise Distributed Object Computing (EDOC) conference has come to encompass much more than just distributed objects. So this event now used the name International EDOC Enterprise Computing Conference, to recognize this broader scope yet also retain the initial conference's name recognition

Информационные технологии: тенденция, пути развития

Показано воздействие Business Intelligence на информационные технологии такие, как технологии предоставления услуг на основе сервисной модели в среде Grid и Cloud Computing. Рассмотрен термин «облачный компьютинг, вычисления в облаке, или облачный сервис».The influence of Business Intelligence on the information technologies, such as the provision of services based on a service model in the Grid and Cloud Computing environment is shown. The term «cloud computing, calculation in a cloud, or a cloud service» is considered.Показано вплив Business Intelligence на інформаційні технології такі, як технології надання послуг на основі сервісної моделі в середовищі Grid та Cloud Computing. Розглянуто термін «хмарний комп’ютинг, обчислення в хмарі, або сервіс у хмарах»