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

The new trend of Grid is represented by the migration towards a model built on concepts and technologies inheriting from Grid and Web Services communities. By merging these two technologies, the new concept of Grid Service has emerged and has been formalized through 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 places no requirements on implementation aspects. No mandatory constraint is requested for implementing Grid Services; the developers can exploit 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 investigating the design of a Grid Information Service (GIS) by exploiting these technologies, which we consider an interesting operating environment for Grid Services, due to the high level of integration of the provided services. Advantages and drawbacks of both technologies, and our solution are here pointed out.