Stavros Isaiadis

Integrating mobile devices into the grid: design considerations and evaluation

Mobile devices increasingly offer functionality beyond the one provided by traditional resources – processor, memory and applications. This includes, for example, integrated multimedia equipment, intelligent positioning systems, and different kinds of integrated or accessible sensors. For future generation Grids to be truly ubiquitous we must find ways to compensate for the limitations inherent in these devices and integrate them into the Grid, in order to leverage available resources and broaden the range of supplied services. The unreliability and limitations surrounding the mobile resources and services could significantly degrade the overall Grid availability and performance. In this paper, we propose the utilization of various mobile devices in the form of a single virtual wireless “cluster” that will hide the heterogeneity and dynamicity, mask the failures and quietly recover from them, provide centralized management and monitoring and allow for the federation of similar services or resources towards advanced functionality, quality of service, and enhanced performance. Finally, we present and analyze the results from the simulative performance evaluation of this design.

Towards building a generic grid services platform: a components-oriented approach

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.

A lightweight platform for integration of mobile devices into pervasive grids

For future generation Grids to be truly pervasive we need to allow for the integration of mobile devices, in order to leverage available resources and broaden the range of supplied services. For this integration to be realized, we must reconsider the design aspects of Grid systems that currently assume a relatively stable and resourceful environment. We propose the use of a lightweight Grid platform suitable for resource limited devices, coupled with a proxy-based architecture to allow the utilization of various mobile devices in the form of a single virtual “cluster”. This virtualization will hide the heterogeneity and dynamicity, mask the failures and quietly recover from them, provide centralized management and monitoring and allow for the federation of similar services or resources towards advanced functionality, quality of service, and enhanced performance. In this paper we are presenting the major functional components of the platform.

Design and Implementation of a Hybrid P2P-based Grid Resource Discovery System

Component-oriented development is a software design method which enables users to build large scale Grid systems by integrating independent and possibly distributed software modules (components), via well defined interfaces, into higher level components. The main benefit from such an approach is improved productivity. Firstly, due to abstracting away network level functionalities, thus reducing the technical demands on the developer. Secondly, by combining components into higher level components, component libraries can be built up incrementally and made available for reuse. In this paper, we share our initial experiences in designing and developing an integrated development environment for Grids to support component-oriented development, deployment, monitoring, and steering of large-scale Grid applications. The development platform, which is tightly integrated with Eclipse software framework, was designed to empower the developer with all the tools necessary to compose, deploy, monitor, and steer Grid applications. We also discuss the overall functionality, design aspects, and initial implementation issues.Component-oriented development is a software design method which enables users to build large scale Grid systems by integrating independent and possibly distributed software modules (components), via well defined interfaces, into higher level components. The main benefit from such an approach is improved productivity. Firstly, due to abstracting away network level functionalities, thus reducing the technical demands on the developer. Secondly, by combining components into higher level components, component libraries can be built up incrementally and made available for reuse. In this paper, we share our initial experiences in designing and developing an integrated development environment for Grids to support component-oriented development, deployment, monitoring, and steering of large-scale Grid applications. The development platform, which is tightly integrated with Eclipse software framework, was designed to empower the developer with all the tools necessary to compose, deploy, monitor, and steer Grid applications. We also discuss the overall functionality, design aspects, and initial implementation issues.

Methodology for component-based development of grid applications

Component-based software technologies have emerged as a modern approach to software development for distributed and Grid applications. However, the lack of longer-term experience and the complexity of the target systems demand more research results in the field. This paper provides a generic method to develop applications based on a Grid Component Model (GCM). We discuss the main advantages of our methodology -- reduced development cycle, increased portability, and support of dynamic properties of the GCM-based component framework. We then introduce our integrated environment designed to enable component-based development of Grid applications. After that we illustrate the methodology using as an example the development of a complex distributed business process application for a biometric identification system. Finally, we report our initial findings and experiences of applying the methodology and the integrated environment, to best exploit the GCM framework.

Dynamic service-based integration of mobile clusters in grids

The emergence of pervasive and mobile computing has drawn research attention to integrated mobile Grid systems. These new hybrid Grids consist of a typical SOA backbone extended to include mobile and small scale devices such as personal digital assistants, smart-phones, multimedia devices, and intelligent sensors. In a fully integrated model, mobile devices are able to act both as consumers and providers to open up a completely new range of very interesting possibilities in exploiting their mobile nature, unique functionality, and context awareness. However, in resource-limited environments, traditional SOA frameworks cannot easily be deployed since they assume a plethora of available device resources, and have a number of complex dependencies, thus rendering them unsuitable for resource-constrained devices. Therefore, a smaller and simpler server-side container with reduced requirements and dependencies is needed. The contribution of this paper is two-fold: first, we have designed a J2ME-compliant socketbased server-side container, and second, we have demonstrated how an aggregator framework enables such mobile services to be accessed using standard-based Web services in a high-level manner.