Component metadata management and publication for the grid

There is growing attention to component-oriented software design of Grid applications. Within this framework, applications are built by assembling together independently developed software components. Two main approaches are commonly used to manage, develop and publish software components: one is based on an Interface Description Language (IDL); the other is typical, for instance, of Java and is based on introspection and design conventions. In this paper, we compare them and we propose a third approach that merges the flexibility and fast learning curve of the latter, with the rigor of the former. Our proposal is meant to help the transition towards more modern tools, which is required to develop versatile Grid applications. © 2005 IEEE

How to run scientific applications over web services

Today, the task of running and coordinating a scientific application across several administrative domains is extremely complex. As an example, the most popular tool for scientific applications, MPI, is not designed to address firewall limitations or data heterogeneity, even if its extensions deal with some of these problems. In this paper, we design a new approach to run a scientific application in a distributed environment, when data and computing power are scattered across the Web: Web Services can be used to tunnel computation and data migration. We show that a very simple mapping exists between MPI primitives and the Web Service infrastructure. We are currently designing a framework, based on Web Services, which will implement the main MPI primitives: this way an MPI application could be run on any platform supporting Web Services. © 2005 IEEE

An evaluation of component-based software design approaches

The various aspects of component-oriented software design of grid application are discussed. The components are the independently developed, composable, re-usable, substitutable software solutions, with clearly defined interface and behavior. The legacy code is developed with the tool of choice, and signature is extracted using headers, pattern matching and binary analysis. The signature is analyzed according to standard and design conventions, and bridging code to frameworks is generated with ad-hoc conversions