ABSTRACT
As a result of the advances in wide-area networks, distributed scalable systems such as grid computing [1], and the evolutions of Web technologies and service-oriented architecture (SOA), there is a lot of demand for providing effi cient services over a shared infrastructure where heterogeneous resources can be aggregated and manipulated to improve the service capacities over the Internet (e.g., to provide high-performance computational services that are impossible to handle with a local PC or a local cluster). The cooperative infrastructures (e.g., LCG [2], DataGrid [3], PPDG [4], NGPP [5]) have the advantages of dramatically decreasing the processing time for high-performance computing applications, avoiding the capital investment on physical resources, enabling cross-domain cooperation, and allowing various service providers to provide versatile services by integrating a variety of resources, functions, applications, and so on.
