Service-Oriented Science: Scaling the Application and Impact of eResearch

The importance of service-oriented architecture for science is widely recognized. Increasingly, scientific communities are making information tools accessible as services that clients can access over the network, without knowledge of their internal workings. In this way, tools formerly accessible only to the specialist can be made available to all. Equally importantly, new value-added services can be constructed that integrate other services to automate useful tasks. The value of such service-oriented science has been demonstrated in disciplines as diverse as astronomy [9], biology [6, 8], and fusion science [7]. I am concerned here with the question of how we can scale the application and impact of such approaches. I argue that a key to progress is achieving a separation of concerns between the construction and hosting of science services, so that scientists can focus on constructing content rather than on the minutiae of operating scalable and robust services. I suggest that if appropriate mechanisms are identified, we can enable distinct content provider, service provider, and resource provider roles, with associated economies of scale [3]. The mechanisms required to achieve these goals are provided, in part, by Grid infrastructure [5]. I review the mechanisms that have been developed to date for Grid infrastructure and experience gained implementing these mechanisms, for example within the open source Globus Toolkit version 4 [2]. I present a range of dynamic service deployment scenarios, in which for example the TeraGrid [1] and Open Science Grid [4] are used to host services for science communities. I discuss how these scenarios demonstrate the potential for scaling service-oriented science