Deep Middleware for the Divergent Grid

Next-generation Grid applications will be highly heterogeneous in nature, will run on many types of computer and device, will operate within and across many heterogeneous network types, and must be explicitly configurable and runtime reconfigurable. We refer to this future Grid environment as the “divergent Grid”. In this paper, we propose a “deep middleware” approach to meeting key requirements of the divergent Grid. Deep middleware reaches down into the network to provide highly flexible network support that underpins a rich, extensible and reconfigurable set of application-level “interaction paradigms” (such as publish-subscribe, multicast, tuple spaces etc.). In our Gridkit middleware platform, these facilities are encapsulated in two key component frameworks: the interaction framework and the overlay framework, which are the subject of this paper. The paper also evaluates the two frameworks in terms of their configurability (e.g. ability to be profiled for different device types) and reconfigurability (e.g. to self-optimise as the environment changes).