Grid Service Composition in BPEL for Scientific Applications

Grid computing aims to create an accessible virtual supercomputer by integrating distributed computers to form a parallel infrastructure for processing applications. To enable service-oriented Grid computing, the Grid computing architecture was aligned with the current Web service technologies; thereby, making it possible for Grid applications to be exposed as Web services. The WSRF set of specifications standardized the association of state information with Web services (WS-Resource) while providing interfaces for the management of state data. The Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) is the leading standard for integrating Web services and as such has a natural affinity to the integration of Grid services. In this paper, we share our experience on using BPEL to integrate, create, and manage WS-Resources that implement the factory pattern. To the best of our knowledge, this work is among the handful approaches that successfully use BPEL for orchestrating WSRF-based services and the only one that includes the discovery and management of instances.