A component-based approach to build a portable and flexible middleware for metacomputing
The huge amount of computing resources in the Internet makes it possible to build metacomputers for solving large-scale problems. Despite the great availability of software infrastructures for managing such systems, metacomputer programming is often based on models that do not appear to be suitable to run applications on wide-area, unreliable, highly-variable networks of computers. In this paper, we present a customisable, Java-based middleware which provides programmers with a portable and flexible framework to run applications over a hierarchical, virtual network architecture. The middleware is designed according to a component-based approach that enables the execution behaviour of each computing node to be customised in order to satisfy application needs. The paper shows some examples of programming model customisation and demonstrates that flexibility can be achieved without significantly compromising performance. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
middleware metacomputing component framework grid computing