Mirroring resources or mapping requests: implementing WS-RF for grid workflows

The Web services resource framework (WS-RF) and the Web services notification (WS-N) specifications are a crucial component of grid infrastructures. They provide a standardized interface to stateful services so that they can be managed remotely. There are already several implementations of these specifications and initial performance studies have compared them in terms of the overhead observed by a single client. In this paper, we address the problem of implementing the WS-RF and WS-N specifications for large scale systems. In particular, we discuss how to implement WS-RF and WS-N as the management interfaces to a grid workflow engine. In the paper we describe and compare two different architectures for mapping resources to processes. The first one mirrors the state of the process as a resource. The second one maps the client requests to access the state of a resource embedded into the grid workflow engine. We include an extensive performance evaluation, comparing the resulting systems in terms of scalability when servicing a large number of concurrent clients.