1 An OGSA Compliant Environment for eScience Service Management Vladimir Florian, Gabriel Neagu and Stefan Preda Department of Advanced Research, Modeling and Consultancy National Institute for Research and Development in Informatics (ICI) Bucharest, Romania {vladimir,gneagu,stefanalex}@ici.ro Abstract— In a distributed environment with high performance requirements, the setup and execution of workflow oriented applications for eScience should be based on efficient solutions for available resource monitoring and scheduling and on effective and flexible mechanisms for application composition using the existing middleware infrastructure. Our currently running research project, entitled PEGAF (Romanian acronym for “Experimental Grid platform for development of workflow oriented applications with dynamic allocation of resources”) tries to fulfill these requirements. Its main objectives are to provide a user friendly platform for eScience workflow oriented application development and execution and also to support the implementation of adaptive scheduling strategies using a standard based Grid infrastructure. After a short presentation of the research project fundamental principles, the paper describes the PEGAF platform general architecture, than focusing on the adopted implementation solution for the OGSA compliant service container component as part of the larger PEGAF project. Keywords- Grid service, workflow management, OGSA, information model, service container. I. INTRODUCTION Software service modeling and management is presently considered as core functionality for managing experiments in eScience. For High Performance Computing systems, the paradigm shift towards Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) has been marked by the development of the Open Grid Service Architecture (OGSA) specifications [1] and the Software as a Service concept. The objective of OGSA specifications is to provide standards for integrating distributed and heterogeneous Grid resources. Based on these specifications, efforts have been made to provide OGSA compliant service implementations and functionality on top of specific Grid middleware [2]. The objective of the PEGAF project entitled “Experimental Grid platform for development of workflow oriented applications with dynamic allocation of resources” is to provide a service based environment aiming to support eScience workflow composition, run and management and Grid service orchestration and scheduling. The project is funded by a National Research Programme of the Romanian Government and is currently developed by a consortium including ICI Bucharest – Dept. of Research, “Politehnica” University of Bucharest - Computer Science Dept., West University of Timisoara – Computer Science Dept. and Commercial Company for System Engineering SIS S.A. Bucharest. The basic requirements for this platform have their origin in the implementing experience of applications for the first national Grid enabled virtual organization GridMOSI in the fields of mathematical modeling, optimization and simulation [3]. The paper is mainly devoted to the Service Infrastructure architecture which is currently implemented and will be operated as part of the PEGAF platform. The remainder of the paper is organized as follows: section 2 shortly describes the fundamental principles which the platform implementation is based on; section 3 gives an overview of the PEGAF platform architecture and functionality; section 4 is devoted to OGSA service layer of the PEGAF architecture, the OGSA compliant information service as support for semantic and metadata required at the service orchestration level, the architecture of the service container integrating the OGSA information model, the basic execution service implementation and the process orchestration engine. Section 5 includes a short overview of related research work. Conclusions and future work are presented in section 6. II. FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES OF THE RESEARCH PROJECT A. OGSA compliant Grid services In 2002 Foster, Kesselman, Nick and Tuecke stated that standardization is essential to let the vision of Grid computing become reality [8]. They introduced the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) to define a standardized Grid architecture which describes mechanisms for creating, naming and discovering transient Grid service instances. Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) is a set of standards defining the architecture for service-oriented Grid computing. OGSA specifications address Grid application issues such as authentication, authorization, policy negotiation and enforcement, administration of service-level