Will SOA accommodate the next step of e-science?

High performance computing infrastructures, such as the Grid, have become available to several scientific communities but their use is often limited due to the high level of technical detail needed for the successful deployment of applications. The next step for supporting e-scientists is to provide them with an e-science environment that comprises high level services which may be easy and directly usable while hiding the underlying infrastructure. Towards this aim, the paper proposes to extend the use of solutions developed for business environments and in particular the adoption of a Service Oriented Architecture. An architectural model for the deployment of scientific workflows is presented as well as a case study to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach