Service Oriented Architectures for grid computing environments: Opportunities and challenges

Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) support the development of software applications as loosely coupled discrete web services capable of running on multiple software and hardware platforms. Grid computing has allowed for the virtualization of both hardware and software resources, whereby it is possible to dynamically share, select, and use geographically distributed resources based on users' needs. While Grid computing offers a way of distributing the system resources dynamically, SOA provides open standards based Web services for its users to discover and use available resources across the system. Hence it is a natural fit to leverage the benefits of Grid computing architectures using SOA. This paper examines the current developments in providing SOA based open standards for Grid services and some of their limitations.