A Service-Oriented, Scalable Approach to Grid-Enabling of Legacy Scientific Applications

This paper describes a scalable approach to the enabling oflegacy scientific applications on computing Grids using a service- oriented architecture. In the context of this paper Grid enabling means turning an existing application, installed on a Grid resource,into a service and generating the application-specific user interfacesto use that application through a web portal. Scalability is achievedby providing a common abstraction for a category of applicationsand providing a "generic" application service to wrap those applications as services. The focus of this paperýs approach is on Grid-enabling"command-oriented" scientific applications. The novel aspect of the approach is that the entire process - from turning an application intoa service to the user-interface generation for that application - isdone automatically, without requiring coding or Grid-system downtime.Portlet technology is used to dynamically generate application-specific interfaces. Further, the approach makes it possible to customize theapplications for different user groups by way of simplifying, restrictingor composing the functionalities of applications. The approach isuseful for building Grid portals on which a large number of applicationsneed to be dynamically enabled.