Web services technology has become the ubiquitous connectivity fabric amongst diverse business domains and technical camps. At the same time, distributed parallel computing is becoming the de facto architecture for managing the performance of computationally intensive, long-running programs.
So, is it counterintuitive to consider Web services when pursuing performance improvement of compute-intense, long-running applications? It may seem that way but, most amazingly, Web services play a critical role not in one but in two areas of High Performance Computing (HPC) and distributed parallel computing:
- Communications/deployment
- Classifications/discovery services of resources
In other words, Web services play a role in the application adaptation and infrastructure layer, respectively. Sensibly enough, Web services deliver again on the promise of semantic and syntactic universal collaboration and wide acceptance in yet another coming-of-age technology.
This article looks at how the Web services scenario is unfolding in the distributed parallel computing space. First it discusses the developing infrastructure standards, followed by some definitions, and then delves into the real grid opportunity: to improve application response time while workload balancing. I'll conclude with a recent project implementation.
