GridIJ – A Dynamic Grid Service Architecture for Scientific Image Processing

The presented dynamic Grid service architecture pro-vides a novel and comfortable access for scientific soft-ware developers and users without prior knowledge of Grid technologies or even the underlying architecture. A sim-ple Java API allows the extension of WSRF–compliant web services by scientific software components deployed auto-matically on available GT4 containers. In preparation only two services are started on each container allowing hot– deployment and simple performance analysis. GridIJ is a reference implementation of the presented architecture with a problem solving environment for im-age processing. A plugin with a GUI extends the free soft-ware ImageJ, providing control of the architecture, deploy-ing scientific software components (GridPlugins), distribut-ing data to process in parallel, controlling the workflow and returning the results. First tests showed the simple usage and extension by GridPlugins of the system. In principle the performance in parallel execution scales linearly with an additional small overhead for connecting and data transfer.