Web Services
Built on industry standards, Web services technologies allow applications to interoperate
across programming languages, platforms, and operating systems.
Loosely Coupled HPC Applications
Web services enable certain classes of HPC applications, specifically those that
are very loosely-coupled, to distribute computation and data from a desktop or
mobile device to remote servers or “workers.” Each “worker” solves only one
part of the larger problem.
Finance and life sciences are among the fields with loosely coupled
applications that may be excellent candidates for Web services architectures.
Advantages
Web services technologies can provide ease of development and deployment
advantages.
A Web service can:
- enable client programs to call your program remotely
- launch your program via a Web browser
- load balance parallel codes or many runs of code that you want to enable your collaborators to run
Deployment Examples
The Center used XML-based Web services architectures,
SQL Server, and Excel to design and deploy an
application for the Northeast Regional Climate Center. This application enables NOAA to deliver
more accurate, higher resolution climate data.
In another example, the Center used Web services to price callable-bond portfolios with an
Excel front-end launching computations on a remote HPC cluster. Each bond was
priced by one processor in the cluster, independently of all other bonds. As the bonds
were priced, the results were returned to the client.
CAC collaborates with
Cornell Operations Research and Information Engineering
which
has financial engineering expertise and operates
OR Manhattan, a Cornell facility in the heart of New York City's financial district.
Web Portals
Web services are a framework technology that can be used to build computational and
data Web portals.
CAC offers Web portal design services to our clients.
