Grid Web Services @ IU Extreme! Lab

This page contains links to Grid and Web Service projects developed in IU Extreme! Lab that are used in portals and in scientific applications.

What is new?
Projects
Papers
Future Work
Contact

What is new?

• 2006-09-12: XCppRefl - C++ Reflection Library. Reflection enables a program to dynamically examine, analyze, and even modify itself. This facilitates adaptive behavior such as rebinding calls to different functions at runtime to integrate newly discovered components, or integrating flexible interpreted languages with compiled languages such as C++ or Fortran. Currently, however, reflection is not available in languages commonly used in high performance computing. This implementation of C++ reflection uses code generation to add metadata. It is fully compliant with the standard C++ specification.
• 2006-09-06: XBS - Streaming Binary Serializer for High Performance Computing is a binary serialization library. It differs from other binary serializers in that it is a streaming serializer (as opposed to message-oriented), and that it is object-oriented. XBS is written in C++, and its object-orientation facilitates its use in modern high performance applications. Since XBS is a streaming serializer, it is suitable for situations where the data is composed of large, complex, and dynamic data structures. It does not impose any highlevel structure on the data as does XML. Any such structures would be implemented in a layer operating on top of XBS. For example, a Binary XML format can be built on top of it. Also, it would be possible to build a SOAP engine that supports binary XML, in addition to the regular textual XML.
• 05-05-05: XBaya Workflow Composer added.
• 2005-04-15: WS-Messenger is available.
• 2004-12-06: WS-Dispatcher, WS-MsgBox, and XML Services Utility Library (XSUL) are available.

Projects

Active projects:

• Generic Service Toolkit allows application providers to "wrap" any command-line application as a secure and scalable web service. It can also create and deploy the web service on-demand from workflows.
• XBaya Workflow Composer allows users to graphically compose workflows from Web services. described in WSDL, connect outputs of Web services to inputs of other Web services, and create workflow scripts that invokes Web services.
• WS-Messenger implements both WS-Notification and WS-Eventing and supports automatic conversion between the two specifications.
• WS-Dispatcher allows internal services to be safely exposed to Internet and allows clients that do not have endpoints to become true WS peers and supports intermittently connected clients that may be moving between networks.
• WS-MsgBox provides a service which is similar to P.O. Mail Boxes but works for Web Services that uses WS-Addressing.
• WS/XSUL: Web / XML Services Utility Library provides an easy way to create and access Web Services (regardless of location or protocol as long as they are described in WSDL and use XML Infoset)
• GSX: Grid Service eXtensions for XSoap allows you to write OGSI compliant Grid Services
• MXP1: Xml Pull Parser (XPP3/MXP1) is a stable XmlPull parsing engine that is based on ideas from XPP, and in particular XPP2, but completely revised and rewritten to take the best advantage of latest JIT JVMs such as Hotspot in JDK 1.4+.

Other projects: Scientific Workflows Survey

No longer active:

• Xydra: XHTMl form generator to invoke web-services described in WSDL
• XMessages/XEvents: Application Level Messaging and Events for Grid (deprecated by WS-Messender)
• Application Factory Web Service (AFWS): deployment and management of distributed applications - replaced by Gfac
• XSOAP (aka SoapRMI): provides convenient Remote Method Invocation (RMI) abstraction that works both in Java and C++. Additionally, implementation of Grid Security Infrastructure (GSI) based on Java CoG Kit is available for XSOAP/Java. Replaced by WS/XSUL.
• Xml Pull Parser (XPP2) - XPP2 was created during development of SoapRMI (predecessor of XSOAP) when we have identified need for simple to use streaming XML pull parser when working with SOAP/XML content (see our technical report). XPP2 (successor of XPP) is now part of XSOAP but can also be used separately.

Papers

Investigating the Limits of SOAP Performance for Scientific Computing
Kenneth Chiu, Madhusudhan Govindaraju, Randall Bramley, Indiana University. Accepted for publication in the Proceedings of HPDC 2002. (ps version), (pdf version).

Design of an XML based Interoperable RMI System : SoapRMI C++/Java 1.1
A. Slominski, M. Govindaraju, D. Gannon and R. Bramley, Proceedings of the International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Processing Techniques and Applications, Volume IV, CSREA Press, pp. 1661-1667, Las Vegas, Nevada, June 25-28, 2001. (HTML version, pdf version, and ps version).

Technical report: XEvents/XMessages: Application Events and Messaging Framework for Grid
Aleksander Slominski, Yogesh Simmhan, Albert Louis Rossi, Matthew Farrellee, Dennis Gannon Indiana University (HTML version, pdf version, and ps version).

Technical report TR559 about SOAP for High Performance Computing (ps version), (pdf version). (another pdf version).

Technical report TR548 about Design of XML based Interoperable SoapRMI for C++ and Java (HTML version).
Accepted for publication in the proceedings of PDPTA 2001

Technical report TR549 about An Extensible and Interoperable Event System Architecture Using SOAP (HTML online version, pdf version, and ps version). NOTE: this technical report describes SoapRMI Events system that is replaced by XEvents.

Technical report TR550 about Design of a Pull and Push Parser System for Streaming XML (HTML online version, ps version and pdf version).

Paper On the Performance of Remote Method Invocation for Large-Scale Scientific Applications (online HTML version or as PDF document in proceedings of SC00, or  locally cached PDF version )

Coming soon ...

We are continuously working on adding and improving projects. Check this page for changes.

Contact

For more information send question to xgws-user mailing list and report a bug.