Design of a OGSA-Compliant Grid Information Service Using .NET Technologies

The Grid's new trend is represented by the migration towards a model built on concepts and technologies that are inherited from Grid and Web Services communities. From the merging of these two technologies, the new concept of Grid Service has merged and has been formalized with the introduction of the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA). OGSA defines the semantics of Grid Service instance, such as, how it is created, how it is named, how its lifetime is determined. OGSA does not place any requirements on implementation aspects. No mandatory constraint is requested for implementing Grid Services; the developers can explicit the features that characterize their target implementation environment. In the framework of the Grid Based Application Service Provision (GRASP) European project we are developing a OGSA compliant middleware by using .NET technologies. According to this goal we are investigate the design of a Grid Information Service (GIS) by exploiting these technologies, which we consider an interesting operating environment for Grid Services, due to high level integration of the services provided. Advantages and drawbacks of both these technologies and our solution are pointed out.