Generic QoS support for Application Web Services

In this paper we present a generic QoS support infrastructure for Application Web Services addressing the special requirements of compute-intensive, time-critical applications. We describe the provision of parallel applications available on clusters or other parallel computers as QoS-aware Web services, which are capable of dynamically negotiating with clients various QoS guarantees in the form of Web Service Level Agreements. QoS-aware Web services rely on a configurable QoS management module which comprises a generic performance model, a pricing model and a resource manager that supports advance reservation. The presented QoS infrastructure has been developed in the context of the Vienna Grid Environment and is utilized within the EU project GEMSS, which develops an infrastructure and test-bed for Grid-enabled medical simulation services.