On Building Parallel &; Grid Applications: Component Technology and Distributed Services

Software Component Frameworks are well known in the commercial business application world and now this technology is being explored with great interest as a way to build large-scale scientific applications on parallel computers. In the case of Grid systems, the current architectural model is based on the emerging web services framework. In this paper we describe progress that has been made on the Common Component Architecture model (CCA) and discuss its success and limitations when applied to problems in Grid computing. Our primary conclusion is that a component model fits very well with a services-oriented Grid, but the model of composition must allow for a very dynamic (both in space and in time) control of composition. We note that this adds a new dimension to conventional service workflow and it extends the “Inversion of Control” aspects of most component systems. Dennis Gannon is a professor of Computer Science at Indiana University. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois in 1980 and his Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of California in 1974. From 1980 to 1985, he was on the faculty at Purdue University. His research interests include software tools for high performance distributed systems and problem solving environments for scientific computation. Sriram Krishnan received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Indiana University in 2004. He is currently in the Grid Development Group at the San Diego Supercomputer Center where he is working on designing a Web services based architecture for biomedical applications that is secure and scalable, and is conducive to the creation of complex workflows. He received my undergraduate degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Mumbai, India. Liang Fang is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Indiana University. His research interests include Grid computing, Web services, portals, their security and scalability issues. He is a Research Assistant in Computer Science at Indiana University, currently responsible for investigating authorization and other security solutions to the project of Linked Environments for Atmospheric Discovery (LEAD). Gopi Kandaswamy is a Ph.D. student in the Computer Science Department at Indiana University where he is current a Research Assistant. His research interests include Web services and workflow systems for the Grid. Yogesh Simmhan received his B.E. degree in Computer Science from Madras University, India in 2000, and is a doctoral candidate in Computer Science at Indiana University. He is currently working as a Research Assistant at Indiana University, investigating data management issues in the LEAD project. His interests lie in data provenance for workflow systems and its use in data quality estimation. Aleksander Slominski is a Ph.D. student in the Computer Science at Indiana University. His research interests include Grid and Web Services, streaming XML Pull Parsing and performance, Grid security, asynchronous messaging, events, and notifications brokers, component technologies, and workflow composition. He is currently working as a Research Assistant investigating creation and execution of dynamic workflows using Grid Process Execution Language (GPEL) based on WS-BPEL.