Multifaceted Web Services: An Approach to Secure and Scalable Grid Scheduling

A multifaceted or multi-interface web service is a web service that offers interfaces to clients and to other peer web services. The multifaceted web service uses a generic parameter-based approach developed in this paper to allow for collaboration between web servers. This parametric approach solves security and scalability problems and is found to be applicable in many situations. Such an approach is necessary to permit easy collaboration and secure resource sharing. We describe one instantiation of such an approach in the form of a global grid scheduler for data parallel (or Single Program Multiple Data) programs. This scheduler demonstrates the usefulness of our approach in current business environments where administrative policies are a major factor in scheduling decisions.