SOAP for High Performance Computing

Abstract

The growing synergy between Web Services and Grid-based technologies will potentially enable profound, dynamic interactions between scientific applications dispersed in geographic, institutional, and conceptual space. Such deep interoperability requires the simplicity, robustness, and extensibility for which SOAP was conceived, thus making it a natural lingua franca. Concomitant with these advantages, however, is a degree of inefficiency that may limit the applicability of SOAP to some situations. In this paper, we investigate the limitations of SOAP for high-performance scientific computing. We analyze the processing of SOAP messages, and identify the issues of each stage. We also present a high-performance SOAP implementation and a schema-specific parser based on the results of our investigation. Our results assist the assessment of SOAP's ability to meet a given performance requirement. Our implementation is in C++, but we believe that the results have wider application.