Towards Building a Generic Grid Services Platform: A Component-Oriented Approach

Abstract

Grid applications using modern Grid infrastructures benefit from a rich variety of features, because they are designed with built-in exhaustive set of functions. As a result, the notion of a lightweight platform has not been addressed properly yet, and current systems cannot be transplanted, adopted or adapted easily. With the promise of the Grid to be pervasive, it is time to re-think the design methodology for next generation Grid infrastructures. Instead of building the underlying platform with an exhaustive rich set of features, in this chapter, we describe an alternative strategy following a component-oriented approach. Having a lightweight reconfigurable and expandable core platform is the key to our design. We identify and describe the very minimal and essential features that a modern Grid system should always offer and then provide any other functions as pluggable components. These pluggable components can be brought on-line whenever necessary as demanded implicitly by the application. With the support of adaptiveness, we see our approach as a solution towards a flexible dynamically reconfigurable Grid platform.