The Otho Toolkit – Synthesizing tailor-made scientific grid application wrapper services

Abstract

The long lifecycles of many scientific applications tend to surpass multiple generations of Grid technologies opening an increasing gap developers need to bridge. Therefore automatic adaptation and migration of existing software to newer environments remains a vital research field. Most existing state-of-the-art solutions are middleware services that execute programs based on user-provided program descriptions. They force clients to use a generic interface and often lack capabilities to adapt to specific program requirements. This article presents a technique and tool support, the Otho Toolkit, for semi-automatic transformation of existing scientific applications deployed on Grid resources into Grid application services. The generated output are service source codes that are either automatically built and packaged into ready-to-deploy services or taken by developers for manual refinement. The generated services are customised and tailor-made for a specific application, a certain service hosting environment and a given Grid resource. To increase their benefit they can be extended with optional supplements, e.g. automatic retrieval of security credentials. The ‘Invisible Grid’ shields users from any Grid specific technical details. This article presents our first achievements on getting one step closer to this vision.