GSLab

GSLab: A Toolkit for Automatically Wrapping Legacy Codes as GT3 Oriented Grid Services

We have implemented GSLab, a toolkit for automatically wrapping legacy codes as OGSA based Grid services that can be published, discovered and reused in a cluster environment. Two components have been implemented in GSLab, GSFWrapper and GSFAccessor. GSFWrapper is used to automatically wrap legacy codes as Grid services and then deploy them in a Grid service container for publication. GSFAccessor is used to discover Grid services and automatically generate Grid service clients to access the discovered Grid services wrapped from legacy codes using GSFWrapper. To reduce the performance overhead in running a large number of tasks generated from a wrapped Grid service, Sun Grid Engine (SGE) has been employed in GSLab to dispatch the generated tasks to a SGE cluster environment. Using GSFWrapper, we have automatically wrapped a computer animation rendering code written in C as a GT3 factory that can be discovered and accessed from GSFAccessor. We have upgraded GSLab to a Web environment in which services wrapped from legacy codes can be discovered and accessed from the Web.

The benefits of GSLab in wrapping legacy codes as Grid services mainly lie in the following aspects:

• Once wrapped as Grid services, legacy codes can be published, discovered and reused on the Grid.
• Individual Grid services wrapped from legacy codes can be composed into complex Grid applications.
• The lifetime of legacy codes as Grid services can be managed effectively.
• The Grid can provide a high performance-computing environment for legacy codes to solve their data and computation intensive problems.