Applying a Component Model to Grid Application Services

Programming client-side applications based on composing units of distributed software is an important research issue in the Grid computing community. In this context, it is a key requirement to provide application developers with highlevel programming models and frameworks which are well supported by the underlying Grid architecture. In this paper we present an approach that applies a component model to the Vienna Grid Environment, a Web service based Grid environment, which enables the provision of parallel applications as QoS-aware Grid services, whose performance characteristics may be dynamically negotiated between a client application and service providers. Our environment comprises Grid services, a distributed component framework, and a component-based, client-side programming framework. Our component model follows the Common Component Architecture and allows to explicitly express and dynamically manage context dependencies with respect to the hosting environment, computational resources, as well as dependencies on other components. This mechanism serves as a basis for independent service deployment, service selection and composition. Our work can be seen as a first step towards a component-based programming model for service-oriented Grid infrastructures utilizing standard Web services technologies.