Web services extend high-performance computing grid capabilities

Open Standard Middleware Solutions for Grid Computing: Grid services represent a convergence between high-performance computing and Web services that enables the efficient development of grid-computing infrastructures technology. Intel® Solution Services provides professional consulting expertise to customers that wish to implement open standard middleware grid services, based on a long-standing involvement with the software technologies.

---

by Matt Gillespie, technical author. Intel Corp.

Grid computing based on Web services provides a compelling means for enterprises to create High-Performance Computing infrastructures. Adding to the inherent cost/performance advantages of grid networks based on Intel® Xeon™ processors and/or Itanium® 2 processors, building solutions from pre-existing Web services adds efficiency and simplifies the addition of standards-based core functionality to those systems. For those organizations that want expert external guidance in the development of such systems, Intel Solution Services, Intel Corporation's worldwide professional services organization, offers assistance that can range from minor decision support to full consulting and design services.

This article connects the technical community with the decision-making community on topics related to grid computing with Web services on Intel architecture. It helps network designers, solution architects, and policy makers at corporations, research institutions, and other grid-computing facilities learn about using Web services to enable High-Performance Computing on Intel architecture.

Grids as Interoperability Solutions for High-Performance Computing
The success of well-known, non-commercial grid-computing initiatives such as SETI@Home presaged the widespread use of grid networks in commercial enterprises as a cost-effective and scalable means of solving large computing problems. Reports of shrinking the required compute time for a given type of computing operation from a matter of years (on a single monolithic computer) to days on a distributed grid are not uncommon. By implementing otherwise-unused computing resources, companies now widely use grid computing in implementations such as industrial research and complex design simulations.

Grid computing provides for the highest degree of flexibility in the context of the following hierarchy of execution vehicles:

• Individual compute nodes, such as stand-alone servers based on Intel Xeon processors and Itanium 2 processors.
  
• Server clusters, which are traditionally deployed within homogenous organizations or networks. While this architecture provides robust compute power, access and deployment of applications is very manual.
  
• Computing grids provide a middleware-based environment that allows automation and interoperability, so that applications can be deployed efficiently and quickly to a number of sites.

Web services functions as an integration technology (middleware) that significantly enhances the ability of enterprises to put grid computing to work from existing software building blocks. Beyond its ability to create very large high-performance computing architectures from an aggregation of distributed machines, grid computing is now coming into its own as a means for enterprises to manage their distributed resources. One means toward this end is the development of grid services, a class of Web services specifically defined to meet the needs of grid computing.