Design and Evaluation of Opal2: A Toolkit for Scientific Software as a Service
- 1 July 2009
- conference paper
- Published by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
- Vol. 1 (23783818) , 709-716
- https://doi.org/10.1109/services-i.2009.52
Abstract
Grid computing provides mechanisms for making large-scale computing environments available to the masses. In recent times, with the advent of Cloud computing, the concepts of Software as a Service (SaaS), where vendors provide key software products as services over the internet that can be accessed by users to perform complex tasks, and Service as Software (SaS), where customizable and repeatable services are packaged as software products that dynamically meet the demands of individual users, have become increasingly popular. Both SaaS and SaS models are highly applicable to scientific software and users alike. Opal2 is a toolkit for wrapping scientific applications as Web services on Grid and cloud computing resources. It provides a mechanism for scientific application developers to expose the functionality of their codes via simple Web service APIs, abstracting out the details of the back-end infrastructure. Services may be combined via customized workflows for specific research areas and distributed as virtual machine images. In this paper, we describe the overall philosophy and architecture of the Opal2 framework, including its new plug-in architecture and data handling capabilities. We analyze its performance in typical cluster and Grid settings, and in a cloud computing environment within virtual machines, using Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2).Keywords
This publication has 14 references indexed in Scilit:
- Ensemble-Based Virtual Screening Reveals Potential Novel Antiviral Compounds for Avian Influenza NeuraminidaseJournal of Medicinal Chemistry, 2008
- The Otho Toolkit – Synthesizing tailor-made scientific grid application wrapper servicesMultiagent and Grid Systems, 2007
- Building web services for scientific grid applicationsIBM Journal of Research and Development, 2006
- A Component-Based Software Environment for Visualizing Large Macromolecular AssembliesStructure, 2005
- Kepler: an extensible system for design and execution of scientific workflowsPublished by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ,2004
- Xen and the art of virtualizationPublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,2003
- The Anatomy of the Grid: Enabling Scalable Virtual OrganizationsThe International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications, 2001
- NPACI: rocks: tools and techniques for easily deploying manageable Linux clustersPublished by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ,2001
- A security architecture for computational gridsPublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,1998
- A resource management architecture for metacomputing systemsPublished by Springer Nature ,1998