A Service-oriented, Scalable, Secure Framework for Grid-enabling Legacy Scientific Applications

of Thesis Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Science A SERVICE-ORIENTED, SCALABLE, SECURE FRAMEWORK FOR GRIDENABLING LEGACY SCIENTIFIC APPLICATIONS By Vivekananthan Sanjeepan December 2005 Chair: José A.B. Fortes Major Department: Electrical and Computer Engineering This thesis describes a scalable and secure framework for Grid-enabling legacy scientific applications using a service-oriented architecture. In the context of this thesis Grid-enabling means turning an existing application, installed on a Grid resource, into a service and generating the application-specific user interfaces to use that application through a web portal. Scalability, with respect to Grid-enabling a large number of different types of applications, is achieved by providing a common abstraction for a category of applications and providing a “generic” application service to wrap those applications as services. The focus of this framework is on Grid-enabling “commandline” scientific applications. The novel aspect of the framework is that the entire process—from turning an application into a service to the user-interface generation for that application—is done automatically without requiring coding or Grid-system downtime. Technical contributions of this thesis are (1) an abstraction that is generic enough to capture the descriptions of numerous types of applications, (2) an XML