Light Weight Grid Platform: Design Methodology Vladimir Getov University of Westminster

Motivation Realization of pervasive computing in Grid. Extending the Grid services and benefits to wider scale of applications and devices is not trivial. Existing Grid Systems cannot entirely address this issue. Real challenges are with Grid platforms than with Grid Applications. Solution: a light-weight generic Grid platform – which could adapt itself to the context of usage.

Features of Existing Grid Systems Overwhelmingly feature-rich: preventing self-adaptive deployment and ad-hoc usage of the systems Unnecessary software and administrative overheads. There is no concept of self-adaptation to context

Our Strategy Entirely based on component technology Leverages existing viable technologies Considers a wider range of application scenarios The platform is designed to be generic and light-weight

Models and Technologies Component/reference models influence our design: –Common Component Architecture –Fractal Component Model –Enterprise Grid Alliance Reference Model Technologies/projects which influence our design –MOCCA/H20, ProActive, ICENI I/II, Ibis, GRID Superscalar, Alice, etc

Requirements Requirements evolve over time and concrete specifications may not be possible. Analysing requirements of end-users and other frameworks may give us some insight For this purpose, we have analysed the following –MOCCA/H20, ProActive, ICENI I/II, Ibis, Alice, etc Some of the technologies are not platform level frameworks. But they provide key technologies in designing and engineering a platform

Existing Technologies and Design Requirements MOCCA – a lightweight distributed component platform ICENI I/II –a Grid middleware infrastructure ALiCE –A lightweight Grid middleware IBIS –Java based optimising suite/library for Grid GRID Superscalar –a framework to simplify Grid programming

Desired Features Lightweight and generic Static and dynamic metadata Dynamic deployment of components Reconfiguration and adaptivity Support for both client/server and P2P On-demand, provider centric service provision Minimal but sufficient security model Binding and coordination Additional services Distributed management

Overall Architecture

Block Diagram

Use Scenario 1: GENIE Demonstrates the need for scalable modular architecture for software systems Models the behaviour of large-scale thermohaline circulation Uses various scientific modules corresponding to different environmental fragments Presents number of challenges including –Componentizing the modules –Efficient composition of components –Real-time scheduling, –Model-specific resource constrained simulations –Distributed execution –Consolidation of large volumes of data

Conclusions and Ongoing Work Our main objective was to define a light-weight Grid platform with “pluggable” features We analysed a collection of existing platforms, as well as two use scenarios to extract key requirements that such a light-weight platform has to meet Key issue that needs discussion is non- disruptive, dynamic (re-)configuration of service and component features.