Middleware For Grid Computing Research Articles

Object Based Middleware for Grid Computing

Problem statement: "Grid" computing has emerged as an important new field, distinguished from conventional distributed computing by its focus on large-scale resource sharing, innovative applications and, in some cases, high-performance orientation. The role of middleware is to ease the task of designing, programming and managing distributed applications by providing a simple, consistent and integrated distributed programming environment. Essentially, middleware is a distributed software layer, which abstracts over the complexity and heterogeneity of the underlying distributed environment with its multitude of network technologies, machine architectures, operating systems and programming languages. Approach: This study brought out the development of supportive middleware to manage resources and distributed workload across multiple administrative boundaries is of central importance to Grid computing. Active middleware services that perform lookup, scheduling and staging are being developed that allow users to identify and utilize appropriate resources that provide sustainable system and user-level qualities of service. Results: Different middleware platforms support different programming models. Perhaps the most popular model is object-based middleware in which applications are structured into objects that interact via location transparent method invocation. Conclusion: The Object Management Group’s CORBA platform offer an Interface Definition Language (IDL) which is used to abstract over the fact that objects can be implemented in any suitable programming language, an object request broker which is responsible for transparently directing method invocations to the appropriate target object and a set of services such as naming, time, transactions, replication which further enhance the programming environment.

CONFIIT: a middleware for peer-to-peer computing

CONFIIT (Computation Over Network with Finite number of Independent and Irregular Tasks) is a purely decentralized peer-to-peer middleware for grid computing. This paper presents CONFIIT main features and how it deals with topology changes and communication faults. To illustrate CONFIIT operation, we demonstrate how the car-sequencing problem can be solved in a distributed environment.

Special Issue: Advanced Strategies in Grid Environments—Models and Techniques for Scheduling and Programming

Special Issue: Advanced Strategies in Grid Environments—Models and Techniques for Scheduling and Programming

An implementation of parallel file distribution in an agent hierarchy

PC grid is a cost-effective grid-computing platform that attracts users by allocating to their massively parallel applications as many desktop computers as requested. However, a challenge is how to distribute necessary files to remote computing nodes that may be unconnected to the same network file system, equipped with insufficient disk space to keep entire files, and even powered off asynchronously. Targeting PC grid, the AgentTeamwork grid-computing middleware deploys a hierarchy of mobile agents to remote desktops so as to launch, monitor, check-point, and resume a parallel and distributed computing job. To achieve high-speed file distribution, AgentTeamwork takes advantage of its agent hierarchy. The system partitions files into stripes at the tree root if they are random-access files, duplicates them at each tree level if they are shared among all remote nodes, fragments them into smaller messages if they are too large to relay to a lower tree level, aggregates such messages in a larger fragment if they are in transit to the same subtree, and returns output files to the user along multi-paths established within the tree. To achieve fault-tolerant file delivery, each agent periodically takes a snapshot of in-transit and on-memory file messages with its user job, and thus resumes them from the latest snapshot when they crash accidentally. This paper presents an implementation and its competitive performance of AgentTeamwork's file-distribution algorithm including file partitioning, transfer, check-pointing, and consistency maintenance.

Special Issue: Middleware for Grid Computing

Special Issue: Middleware for Grid Computing

GCitizen: A Grid Middleware for a Transparent Management of the Information about Citizens in the Public Administration

This paper proposes the Grid technology as an integration method of information, existing procedures and resources in the Public Administration. The exposed work supposes, from the point of view of the electronic government, an advance of future trends by means of the usage of Grid technology. On the other hand, from the perspective of Grid technology, the electronic government opens a non-evident field of application for this emergent paradigm of distributed computing. This paper explains gCitizen, which is a Grid middleware based on the GT4 components and WSRF implementation (which are the state-of-the-art in middleware for Grid computing), incorporating new protocols and services which cover the requirements for the integration purposes in the eGovernment frameworks. The system architecture has been designed to enable using the services deployed without a specific a priori knowledge of them. The gCitizen middleware also defines a data model to provide interoperability in the exchange of the information among the different gCitizen services.

Special Issue: Middleware for Grid Computing: A ‘Possible Future’

Special Issue: Middleware for Grid Computing: A ‘Possible Future’

AgentTeamwork: Coordinating grid-computing jobs with mobile agents

AgentTeamwork is a grid-computing middleware system that dispatches a collection of mobile agents to coordinate a user job over remote computing nodes in a decentralized manner. Its utmost focus is to maintain high availability and dynamic balancing of distributed computing resources to a parallel-computing job. For this purpose, a mobile agent is assigned to each process engaged in the same job, monitors its execution at a different machine, takes its periodical execution snapshot, moves it to a lighter-loaded machine, and resumes it from the latest snapshot upon an accidental crash. The system also restores broken inter-process communication involved in the same job using its error-recoverable socket and mpiJava libraries in collaboration among mobile agents. We have implemented the first version of our middleware including a mobile agent execution platform, error-recoverable socket and mpiJava API libraries, a job wrapper program, and several types of mobile agents such as commander, resource, sentinel, and bookkeeper agents, each orchestrating, allocating resources to, monitoring and maintaining snapshots of a user process respectively. This paper presents AgentTeamwork's execution model, its implementation techniques, and our performance evaluation using the Java Grande benchmark test programs.

Special Issue: Middleware for Grid Computing

Special Issue: Middleware for Grid Computing

Special Issue: Middleware for Grid Computing

Special Issue: Middleware for Grid Computing

Ninf-G: A Reference Implementation of RPC-based Programming Middleware for Grid Computing

GridRPC, which is an RPC mechanism tailored for the Grid, is an attractive programming model for Grid computing. This paper reports on the design and implementation of a GridRPC programming system called Ninf-G. Ninf-G is a reference implementation of the GridRPC API which has been proposed for standardization at the Global Grid Forum. In this paper, we describe the design, implementations and typical usage of Ninf-G. A preliminary performance evaluation in both WAN and LAN environments is also reported. Implemented on top of the Globus Toolkit, Ninf-G provides a simple and easy programming interface based on standard Grid protocols and the API for Grid Computing. The overhead of remote procedure calls in Ninf-G is acceptable in both WAN and LAN environments.