Developing Web Services in a Computational Grid Environment

Abstract

Grid and Web services are both hot topics today. In this paper, we will present some ongoing work and planned future work at the Cambridge eScience Centre. After an introduction to these technologies in the context of Grid applications development, we describe two use-cases: a database of results in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and a small computational Grid for aircraft engineering design. As Grid services are moving towards Web services, we continue to make use of the Globus Toolkit v2.4 (GT2.4), without adopting the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) wholesale. In our scenario, GT2.4 integrates distributed computing resources including HPC and clusters while Web services wrap the scientific code as a service.