Improving the Flexibility of Active Grids through Web Services

Active Grids are a form of grid infrastructure where the grid network is active and programmable. These grids directly support applications with value added services such as data migration, compression, adaptation and monitoring. Services such as these are particularly important for eResearch applications which by their very nature are performance critical and data intensive. We propose an architecture for improving the flexibility of Active Grids through web services. These enable Active Grid services to be easily and flexibly configured, monitored and deployed from practically any platform or application. The architecture is called WeSPNI ('Web Services based on Programmable Networks Infrastructure'). We present the architecture together with some early experimental results on using web services to monitor data movement in an active grid.