On-demand service hosting on production grid infrastructures

The Software as a Service (SaaS) methodology is a key paradigm of Cloud computing. In this paper, we focus on an interesting topic--to dynamically host services on existing production Grid infrastructures. In general, production Grids normally employ a Job-Submission-Execution (JSE) model with rigid access interfaces. In this paper, we implement the Cyberaide onServe, a lightweight middleware with a virtual appliance. The Cyberaide onServe implements the SaaS model on production Grids by translating the SaaS model to the JSE model. The Cyberaide onServe can be deployed on demand in a virtual appliance, host users' software as a Web service, accept Web service invocations; finally, the Cyberaide onServe can execute them on production Grids. We have deployed the Cyberaide onServe on the TeraGrid and the test results show that the Cyberaide onServe can provide SaaS functionalities with a good performance.