A standards based approach to enabling legacy applications on the Grid

The Grid holds great potential for users, software developers and resource owners. Users of the Grid are abstracted away from its complexity, while software developers are being provided with a rich middleware in which to develop their applications without the need for a large investment in resources. Resource owners are able to expose their resources, potentially for financial reward, without the need to invest in software. However, as most of the applications which currently exist pre-date the concept of the Grid, they lack the appropriate functionality and/or modularization to exploit it. In this paper we propose the use of a standards based job submission and monitoring system which is capable of deploying legacy applications onto existing resources within the Grid, environment containers for mapping applications into Grid applications, along with the use of web-based portals to expose these applications to the end user. We further propose that applications which comprise a number of legacy tasks can be handled through the use of a workflow enactment service submitting each of these tasks through the standards based job submission system. We exemplify our approach through the e-Protein project by taking their existing proteome annotation software and exposing it as a Grid service. We show how the use of this technique over the Grid can significantly reduce the makespan required for the application. c © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.