[ogsa-wg] paper available: "Alternative Software Stacks for OGSA-based Grids"

[Marty Humphrey]

Hi,

We have just written what I hope will be a productive contribution to the
efforts of this group. It's essentially our experiences implementing
WS-Transfer and using a publicly-available WS-Eventing, and comparing it to
WSRF and WSRF.NET. As we all know, it's a difficult/controversial subject,
but we're hoping we can help the community with a concrete implementation
and evaluation.

Title: Alternative Software Stacks for OGSA-based Grids

Abstract: The Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) has been a major step
forward for Grid Computing, but its de facto reliance on the Web Services
Resource Framework (WSRF) and WS-Notification have left some in the
community questioning if the Grid software and protocols have become too
complex.  In this paper, we consider the feasibility of an "alternative"
software stack, based on WS-Transfer and WS-Eventing. We compare and
evaluate WSRF/WS-Notification vs. WS-Transfer/WS-Eventing, first via a
"hello world" service and then via a more complete Grid scenario for remote
execution called "Grid-in-a-Box". By qualitatively and quantitatively
evaluating each approach, we find that subtle differences exist (e.g., the
naming of resources, the creation of resources) but they are overwhelmingly
equivalent in their functionality and implied performance. Overall, this
paper uniquely shows that there could be alternative software stacks for
OGSA-based Grids.

Full info: M. Humphrey, G. Wasson, Y. Kiryakov, S-M. Park, D. Del Vecchio,
N. Beekwilder, and J. Gray. Alternative Software Stacks for OGSA-based
Grids. University of Virginia Department of Computer Science Tech Report
CS-2005-06. April 2005.

Available:
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~humphrey/papers/AlternativeSoftwareStacksOGSA.pd
f 

We look forward to any comments and discussion!

Regards,
Marty

Marty Humphrey
Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science
University of Virginia