Building Grid Portal Applications from a Web-Service Component Architecture

This paper describes an approach to building Grid applications based on the premise that users who wish to access and run these applications prefer to do so without becoming experts on Grid technology. We describe an application architecture based on wrapping user applications and application workflows as web services and web service resources.These services are visible to the users and to resource providers through a family of Grid portal components that can be used to configure, launch and monitor complex applications in the scientific language of the end user. The applications in this model are instantiated by an application factory service. The layered design of the architecture makes it possible for an expert to configure an application factory service with a custom user interface client that may be dynamical loaded into the portal.