Simplifying grid application programming using web-enabled code transfer tools

This paper deals with one of the fundamental properties of grid computing transferring code between grid nodes and executing it remotely on heterogeneous hosts. Contemporary middleware relies for this purpose on Web Services, which makes application programs complicated and low-level and requires much additional expertise from programmers. We compare two mechanisms for grid application programming with regard to their handling of code transfer - the de-facto standard WS-GRAM in Globus and the higher-level approach based on HOCs (Higher-Order Components). We study the advantages and problems of each approach using a real-world application case study - the sequent alignment problem from bioinformatics. Our experiments show the trade-off between reduced development costs and software complexity when HOCs are used and the higher performance of the applications on the grid when using WS-GRAM.