Compframe 2005

Atlanta, GA, June 22-23, 2005



Abstract
We present an approach and prototype implementation that applies a component based programming model to a service-oriented computational Grid environment. Our system is based on the Vienna Grid Environment (VGE) [1], a Grid infrastructure for automatic HPC application provision over standard Web service technology. VGE services provide generic interfaces for remote job execution, monitoring, error recovery as well as for application level QoS support. A VGE Grid typically comprises multiple services and clients, one or more service registries as well as a certificate authority. VGE client applications are usually written using a Java API which allows the programmer to interact with remote VGE services. The VGE service provision framework is currently being utilized in the GEMSS Project [2] for the Grid provision of advanced medical simulation services which incorporate compute intensive methods such as Finite-element Modeling, Monte Carlo simulation, and Computational Fluid Dynamics. Key aspects of VGE include negotiable QoS support for time-critical service provision, flexible support for business models as well as end-to-end security. Most of these applications consist of various steps of execution for example mesh generation, data analysis, or visualization which can be deployed separately using VGE. VGE client applications are currently being constructed using a service-oriented programming model (registry-lookup, XML-RPC). By integrating a component based model we would like to provide the client with a simple plug-andplay environment (e.g. allowing visual composition) and move the handling of the service-oriented environment away from the client environment towards a component framework.
It is our goal to provide a component-based programming model on top of a service-oriented infrastructure that allows programmers to compose client-side applications from deployed VGE components (Figure 1). We therefore incorporated several Common Component Architecture (CCA) based mechanisms into the system. In this paper we will briefly describe the CCA based component framework, the client programming environment and the mechanism used to integrate Web services with the framework. We further discuss to which extend such a component model can be applied to the functionality provided by VGE. Due to space limitations we omit a detailed description of CCA [3].
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