The Application Hosting Environment: lightweight middleware for Grid based computational science
Stefan J. Zasada, Peter V. Coveney, R. S. Saksena · 2007
Current grid computing technologies have often been seen as being too heavyweight and unwieldy from an end user's perspective, requiring complicated installation and configuration steps to be taken that are too time consuming for most end users.This has led many of the people who would benefit most from grid technology, namely computational scientists, to avoid using it.In response to this we have developed the Application Hosting Environment, a lightweight, easily deployable environment designed to allow the scientist to quickly and easily run unmodified applications on distributed grid resources.This is done by building a layer of middleware on top of existing technologies such as Globus, and exposing the functionally as web services using the WSRF::Lite toolkit.The scientist can start and manage an application via these services, with the extra layer of middleware abstracting the details of the particular underlying grid resource in use.The scientist can concentrate on performing their scientific investigations, rather than learning how to manipulate the underlying grid middleware. Lighting the Blue Touchpaper