High Performance Distributed Computing (HPDC-11), Edinburgh, Scotland, July 24-26, 2002

The research described in this paper is performed as part of the Globus Project. It introduces a new Grid service called InfoGram that combines the ability of serving as information service and as a job execution service. Previously, both services were architected and implemented within the Globus Toolkit as two different services with different wire protocols. Our service demonstrates a significant simplification of the architecture while treating job submissions and information queries alike. The advantage of our service is that it provides backwards compatibility to existing Grid services, while at the same time providing forwards compatibility to the emerging Web services world. Part of the work conducted within this effort is already reused by the current Open Grid Services Architecture prototype implementation.