Service Oriented Approach to High Performance Scientific Computing

Abstract

The Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is embraced in distributed and grid computing to produce high performance results for long time. SOA is likened by application programmers for its trademark characteristics of programmability, efficiency in heterogeneous conditions and fault-tolerance. It has worked well for high performance financial applications. but not for scientific applications which are too fine grained and communication intensive to be efficient on distributed environments. This paper argues that to make SOA model work well for those scientific applications, we need to reduce overhead costs associated with smaller task loads arising from finer granularity and increased communications in those applications. This paper proposes a data service to be used along with the existing compute services in SOA middlewares to enable inter-communication of finer tasks with out loosing SOA properties of programmability and efficiency under heterogeneity. This data service shall better enable high performance scientific computing of medium to fine grained scientific applications.