Exploiting WSRF and WSRF.NET for Remote Job Execution in Grid Environments

The Web Service Resource Framework (WSRF) was announced in January 2004 as a new way for manipulating "stateful resources" to perform grid computing tasks using Web Services. This paper discusses, to our knowledge, the most complex application built to date utilizing WSRF concepts. We describe a remote job execution system that handles scheduling, data movement, security and inter-job dependencies. The application is built on top of WSRF.NET, the first publicly-available toolkit for constructing WSRF-compliant Web Services. WSRF.NET is an open-source project that implements both the WSRF and WS-Notification family of specifications and runs on the Microsoft .NET platform. Our explicit goal in the effort reported in this paper is not to replace the existing tools such as GRAM/GlobusRun, MDS and Condor/Condor-G but rather to evaluate--via a concrete implementation--the new capabilities provided for such Grid operations via WSRF. We find that, in general, WSRF and WS-Notification facilitate far richer client-side and server-side interactions than previously accomplished in the state of the art in Grid computing.