Performance improvement in Web services invocation framework

Summary form only given. Two of the the two main threads in distributed computing that recently show noticeable progress are grid computing and the development of Web-based services. It is our opinion that the adoption of the standards fostered by the Web-service community could improve the level of usability and interoperability of grid systems and lead to the development of metacomputing systems based on reusable, interoperable components. Up to now the adoption of Web services in grid projects has never penetrated the core computational model. This is mainly due to the fact that Web services use by default the SOAP protocol which is extremely ill suited to computational science applications. We show how we leveraged the Web service invocation framework (WSIF) to develop a new high performance binding based on XDR coding and how we improved the general WSIF performance by developing an extension based on a fully static service invocation.