Managing Separation of Concerns in Grid Applications Through Architectural Model Transformations

Abstract

Grids enable the aggregation, virtualization and sharing of massive heterogeneous and geographically dispersed resources, using files, applications and storage devices, to solve computation and data intensive problems, across institutions and countries via temporary collaborations called virtual organizations (VO) as described in [1]. Most implementations result in complex superposition of software layers, often delivering low quality of service and quality of applications. As a consequence, Grid-based applications design and development is increasingly complex, and the use of most classical engineering practices is unsuccessful. Not only is the development of such applications a time-consuming, error prone and expensive task, but also the resulting applications are often hard-coded for specific Grid configurations, platforms and infrastructures. Having neither guidelines nor rules in the design of a Grid-based application is a paradox since there are many existing architectural approaches for distributed computing, which could ease and promote rigorous engineering methods based on the re-use of software components. It is our belief that ad-hoc and semiformal engineering approaches, in current use, are insufficient to tackle tomorrow’s Grid developments requirements. Because Grid-based applications address multidisciplinary and complex domains (health, military, scientific computation), their engineering requires rigor and control. This paper therefore advocates a formal model-driven engineering process and corresponding design framework and tools for building the next generation of Grids. To achieve these objectives, two approaches are combined: (1) a formal semantic is used to model and check Grid applications; (2) a model-driven approach is adopted to promote model re-use, through separation of concerns, to model transformations, to hide the platform complexity and to refine abstract software descriptions into concrete usable ones.