WEDS: a Web services-based environment for distributed simulation

Web services have the potential to radically enhance the ability of researchers to make use of distributed computing resources, but jargon and a plethora of standards make their use almost impossible for the scientist without prior experience of the necessary technologies. A powerful and simple WSRF-based middleware scheme is presented, designed to let scientists remotely deploy single or multiple instances of a pre-existing code across multiple resources, and giving steering, visualization and workflow functionality with only simple modifications to program code. It is hoped that the development and implementation of such a toolkit will be relevant not only to the problem of deploying workstation-class codes in real time, but also the move towards more tractable alternatives to the Globus toolkit for deployment of processes in a high-performance computing environment.