Fast Information Retrieval in the Open Grid Service Architecture

Information retrieval offers resource discovery mechanisms for unstructured information and has thus been identified as a standardization goal by the open grid forum. We argue that an integration of information retrieval into the infrastructure is not only an interesting prospect for grid users, but is in fact necessary because the batch processing approach supported by the open grid service architecture is at odds with the requirements of online query processing. The cost of staging the search indices to an allocated compute node to answer sporadic but frequent search queries is prohibitive. We advocate the use of web services as a cross site messaging mechanism and discuss the alternatives. To investigate, we have designed and built a prototype system for grid image retrieval. Unfortunately, the statelessness and isolation of web services proved problematic for our purposes, but we present a software architecture that can efficiently overcome these issues.