With the advent of the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) and its underlying infrastructure - the Open Grid Services Infrastructure (OGSI) - there was an increasing interest within Grid communities worldwide in Microsoft .NET Web Services technologies and their applicability to Grid services. This collaboration between EPCC; Microsoft Research Limited; and NeSC, the National e-Science Centre and funded under the e-Science Grid Core Programme with the name MS.NETGrid, aimed to exploit this interest by:

• Developing an implementation of the Open Grid Services Infrastructure (OGSI) using .NET technologies.
• Developing a suite of Grid Service demonstrators - including OGSA-DAI demonstrators - that can be deployed under this .NET OGSI implementation.
• Developing training courses and materials to educate and inform the UK e-Science community about .NET and its applicability to Grid applications.
• Delivering training courses to delegates from the e-Science community.

The goal of our project was to provide a practical demonstration to the UK e-Science community of the applicability of Microsoft .NET technologies to the hosting, development and deployment of Grid Services. A complementary goal was facilitating understanding of the Grid and e-Science within Microsoft.

In order to meet the needs of the user community, our project made its deliverables freely available to encourage further use of Microsoft .NET within the UK e-Science programme.

In addition, to facilitate the development of an OGSI .NET community, we fostered links with other groups in this area including:

• Globus (who also developed an implementation of OGSI as part of the Globus Toolkit).
• Grid Computing Group of the University of Virginia who developed an implementation of OGSI on .NET

The project ran from 3rd March 2003 to 19 March 2004.

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