Performance Analysis of a Multi-Physics Simulation System Based on Web Services∗

The ongoing convergence of Grid computing and Web Services has motivated a number of research groups to study the use of SOAP-based Web Services for scientific computing. These studies have exposed various performance problems in using SOAP-based communication, and a number of suggested extensions to the SOAP standard and/or sophisticated implementation strategies have been proposed to eliminate these bottlenecks. In this paper, we describe our experience in building a system based on Web Services for simulating a multi-physics, coupled fluid/thermal/mechanical fracture problem. The system is organized as a collection of geographically-distributed software components in which each component provides a Web Service, and uses standard SOAP-based Web Service protocols to interact with other components. There are a number of advantages to organizing a system in this way, which we discuss. We have analyzed the performance of our system and found that the overhead for using SOAP-based Web Services is small. Our results suggest that the previously identified potential bottlenecks may not be major issues in practice, and that even a standards-compliant implementation like ours can delivery good performance provided Web Services are used judiciously.