With the success of the Grid, there is an accelerating trend towards diversity in terms of both application domains and also, crucially, in the underlying networked infrastructures in use. Furthermore, there is an ever-increasing dynamicity in the Grid which present-day static architectures cannot cope with. The premise of this proposal is that the present Globus and web services-based Grid architecture is unable to cope with these pressures and that a paradigm shift in Grid middleware architecture will be required in the medium term. We will therefore investigate a radically new Grid middleware architecture that is inherently extensible, and is based on a fine-grained, open, component-based structure that is highly configurable and self-adaptive. Furthermore, we will leverage Model Driven Architecture principles to automatically generate appropriate ‘families’ of component configurations for divergent infrastructures (e.g. ad-hoc environments, local clusters, the global Internet), together with bridges that enable these families to interoperate. Crucially, our MDA tool will also generate runtime models that manage the generated configurations according to autonomic computing principles. To evaluate our architecture, which builds on substantial complementary principles developed by the partners, and, indeed on a substantial existing software and infrastructure base, we will port and extend existing e-Science applications developed in the RealityGrid project. We will also focus, by means of associated PhD projects, on how the key non-functional properties of security and dependability can be handled in the architecture.

Prof. Wolfgang Emmerich

• <link http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/j.skene>James Skene</link>
• <link http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/e.rondini>Elisa Rondini</link>

• <link http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk>Dept. of Computing, University of Lancaster</link>
• <link http://btexact.com>BT Exact</link>

• J. Skene and W. Emmerich (2006). <link http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/w.emmerich/publications/ICSE2006/gamma/gamma.pdf>Specifications, not Meta-Models</link>. In Proc. of the ICSE 2006 Workshop on Global integrated Model Mannagement (GaMMa 2006). pp. 47-54. ACM Press.

The Divergent Grid project is funded through the UK EPSRC (Grant Reference EP/C534891/1) in the amount of GBP 291,078.