Specification-based Synthesis of Tailor-made Grid Service Wrappers for Scientific Legacy Codes

The long lifecycles of many scientific applications tend to surpass multiple generations of grid technologies opening an increasing gap developers need to bridge. Automatic adaptation and migration of software to newer environments remains therefore as interesting research question. Most existing state-of-the-art solutions are grid middleware services that execute programs based on provided descriptions forcing clients to use a generic and non-problem-centric interface. This short paper outlines the Otho Toolkit for synthesis of grid application wrapper services based on specifications of scientific legacy programs. The generated output are service source codes that are either automatically built and packaged into a ready-to-deploy services or taken by developers for manual refinement. The services are customised and tailor-made for a specific application, service hosting environment and computational infrastructure. To increase their benefit they can be enhanced with supplemental functionality such as security credential management or filestag-ing. We applied the Otho Toolkit recursively to itself to synthesise a sophisticated factory service that creates application-specific grid services on-demand