How to run scientific applications over Web services

Today, the task of running and coordinating a scientific application across several administrative domains is extremely complex. As an example, the most popular tool for scientific applications, MPI, is not designed to address firewall limitations or data heterogeneity, even if its extensions deal with some of these problems. In this paper, we design a new approach to run a scientific application in a distributed environment, when data and computing power are scattered across the Web: Web services can be used to tunnel computation and data migration. We show that a very simple mapping exists between MPI primitives and the Web service infrastructure. We are currently designing a framework, based on Web services, which will implement the main MPI primitives: this way an MPI application could be run on any platform supporting Web services.