Introducing WEDS: a WSRF-based Environment for Distributed Simulation Technical Report Number UKeS-2004-07

Web services have the potential to radically enhance the ability of researchers to make use of distributed computing resources, but jargon and a plethora of standards make their use almost impossible for the scientist who has no prior experience of the necessary technologies. A powerful and simple WSRFbased middleware scheme is presented, designed to let scientists remotely deploy single or multiple instances of a pre-existing code across multiple resources, and giving steering, visualisation and workflow functionality with only simple modifications to program code. It is hoped that development and implementation of such a toolkit will be relevant not only to the problem of deploying workstation-class codes in real time, but also move towards more tractable alternatives to the Globus toolkit for deployment of processes in a high-performance computing envi-