Design of an OGSA-Compliant grid information service using .NET technologies

The new trend of Grid is represented by the migration towardsa model built on concepts and technologies inheriting from Gridand Web Services communities. By merging these two technologies, thenew concept of Grid Service has emerged and has been formalized throughthe introduction of the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA). OGSAdefines the semantics of Grid Service instance, such as, how it is created,how it is named, how its lifetime is determined. OGSA places no requirementson implementation aspects. No mandatory constraint is requestedfor implementing Grid Services; the developers can exploit the featuresthat characterize their target implementation environment.In the framework of the Grid Based Application Service Provision(GRASP) European project, we are developing a OGSA-compliant middlewareby using .NET technologies. According to this goal we are investigatingthe design of a Grid Information Service (GIS) by exploitingthese technologies, which we consider an interesting operating environmentfor Grid Services, due to the high level of integration of the providedservices. Advantages and drawbacks of both technologies, and our solutionare here pointed out.