Archived: 24 Sept 2008
This report documents the first stages of an investigation into component-based design in object-based distributed systems, the relationship of such design to grid workflows and web services, and in particular the efficient processing of information streams in such an environment. To this end, our initial investigations have focused on the modeling of stream processing in terms of components (as exemplified in the EU CoreGrid project ProActive), and as standardized web services, and to show how a stream processing system can be built from objects, components and services in composition.
Our work so far has demonstrated the feasibility of composing a potentially sophisticated stream processing system from a variety of services and components, including grid-based computational and data resources. We have proposed a concept of a Web Service Stream Deployer (WSSD), for the remote creation, configuration and deployment of streams across widely distributed resources. This allows a user to construct and configure a stream remotely and dynamically from the client end. Our proposal also suggests a solution to a common problem in distributed workflow systems, that of data centralization, whereby information flows between remote processing resources are redundantly routed through a centralized workflow engine.