GridIJ - A Dynamic Grid Service Architecture for Scientific Image Processing

The presented dynamic grid service architecture provides a novel and comfortable access for scientific software developers and users without prior knowledge of grid technologies or even the underlying architecture. A simple Java API allows the extension of WSRF-compliant Web services by scientific software components deployed automatically on available GT4 containers. In preparation only two services are started on each container allowing hot-deployment and simple performance analysis. GridIJ is a reference implementation of the presented architecture with a problem solving environment for image processing. A plugin with a GUI extends the free software Image J, providing control of the architecture, deploying scientific software components (GridPlugins), distributing data to process in parallel, controlling the workflow and returning the results. First tests showed the simple usage and extension by GridPlugins of the system. In principle the performance in parallel execution scales linearly with an additional small overhead for connecting and data transfer.