On-demand Provisioning of Infrastructure, Middleware and Services for Simulation Workflows

Service orientation is a mainstream paradigm in business applications and gains even greater acceptance in the very active field of eScience. In SOC service binding strategies have been defined to specify the point in time a service can be discovered and selected for use, namely static binding, dynamic binding at deployment or at run time, and dynamic service deployment. The basic assumption in all these strategies is that the software stack and infrastructure necessary to execute the services are already available. While in service-based business applications this is typically a valid assumption in scientific applications it is often not the case. Therefore, in this work we introduce a new binding strategy for services we call on-demand provisioning which entails provisioning of the software stack necessary for the service and subsequent dynamic deployment of the service itself. Towards this goal, we also contribute a middleware architecture that enables the provisioning of the software stack-functionality unavailable in conventional service middlewares. We demonstrate the approach and the capabilities of the middleware and the current state of the implementation of our approach. For this purpose we use an example application from the field of eScience that comprises a scientific workflow management system for simulations.