SOAP for High Performance Computing

The growing synergy between Web Services and Grid-based technologies [10] will potentially enable profound, dynamic interactions between scienti c applications dispersed in geographic, institutional, and conceptual space. Such deep interoperability requires the simplicity, robustness, and extensibility for which SOAP [7, 6] was conceived, thus making it a natural lingua franca. Concomitant with these advantages, however, is a degree of ine ciency that may limit the applicability of SOAP to some situations. In this paper, we investigate the limitations of SOAP for high-performance scienti c computing. We analyze the processing of SOAP messages, and identify the issues of each stage. We also present a high-performance SOAP implementation and a schema-speci c parser based on the results of our investigation. Our results assist the assessment of SOAP's ability to meet a given performance requirement. Our implementation is in C++, but we believe that the results have wider application.