Evaluation of UDDI as a provider of resource discovery services for OGSA-based grids

Grid computing involves networks of heterogeneous resources working in collaboration to solve problems that cannot be addressed by the resources of any one organization. A pervasive problem for grid users is how best to discover the resources they need given dynamic grid environments. UDDI, the universal description, discovery and integration framework, is an OASIS standard for publishing and querying discovery information for Web services, which to date, has received surprisingly little analysis as a discovery mechanism for Web service-based grids, e.g. those based on the open grid services architecture (OGSA). This work identifies issues that must be addressed in order to make UDDI meet the requirements of OGSA discovery. We examine the performance implications of these issues using a freely available implementation of UDDI version 2. Based on our experimental results, we conclude that UDDI can be used for OGSA discovery, but the cost may be prohibitive for large grids.