WSDL Grid Binding

The two main threads in distributed computing that recently show noticeable progress are Grid computing and the development of Web-based services. It is our opinion that the adoption of the standards fostered by the web-service community could improve the level of usability and interoperability of grid systems and lead to the development of metacomputing systems based on reusable, interoperable components. Up to now the adoption of Web Services in Grid projects has been limited to ancillary services and has never penetrated the core computational model that is still tightly tied to MPI and PVM. This is mainly due to the fact that Web Services use by default the SOAP protocol which is extremely ill suited to computational science applications. In this paper we show how we leveraged the Web Service Invocation Framework to develop a new high performance binding based on XDR coding