Composable Services Architecture for Grids

Grids provide collaborative environments for integration of the distributed heterogeneous resources and services running on different operating systems (OSs), e.g., Unix, Linux, Windows, embedded systems; Platforms, e.g., J2EE, .NET; and Devices, e.g., computers, instruments, sensors, databases, networks. Such environments need platform-independent technologies for services to communicate across various domains. These kinds of technologies are offered by Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) that provide an architectural framework for loosely coupled set of services and principles to be used within multiple heterogeneous domains. Based on SOA, another architecture, the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA), was built to offer semantics and capabilities to services that reside in grid environments. Examples of such capabilities are statefulness and notifications. As evolution of the existing architectures, in this chapter, we will introduce a service-oriented architecture, the Composable Services Architecture (CSA), aimed to support dynamic service provisioning and integration in grid environments.