Grid Services Architecture plan gaining momentum

Researchers at Argonne National Laboratory, the University of Southern California, and IBM have taken a major step toward combining the commercial promise of Web services with the scientific principles of grid computing, in which far-flung resources can be dynamically allocated. The Open Grid Services Architecture defines the mechanisms for creating, managing, and exchanging information, among entities, called grid services. In two recently released documents (www.globus.org/ogsa), the researchers behind OGSA have discussed high-level guiding concepts as well as the lower-level interfaces at its foundation. The paper discusses open source and Web services aspects. It considers how the OGSA project is addressing two major differences between the grid and Web services paradigms.