Making scientific applications as Web services

This article discusses the general architecture of science portal-service systems and illustrates with a simple example how you could build a constituent service out of a particular application. To make the presentation concrete, we develop a simple wrapper application for a code, Disloc (authored by A. Donnellan of the NASA jet Propulsion Laboratory), which is used in earthquake simulation to calculate surface displacements of observation stations for a given underground fault. Disloc's fast calculation is a particularly useful characteristic because we can provide it as an anonymous service and not have to worry about computer accounts, allocations, and scheduling.