A Continuation-Based Framework for Economy-Driven Grid Service Provision

The management of computational resources is a crucial aspect in grid computing because of the decentralized, heterogeneous and autonomous nature of these resources that usually belong to different administrative domains and are provided in dynamic and changing environments. For this reason more sophisticated computing methodologies are necessary to provide these resources in a flexible manner. In particular, the possibility of controlling the execution of services in grid is a crucial aspect in order to change service execution policies at run-time. In the present work an infrastructure to model service providers is proposed to allow for flexible provision of grid services, i.e. to allow providers to dynamically control the execution of services according to the changing conditions of the environment where they operate in. The infrastructure is based on continuations, a programming paradigm that allows to control the state of program execution at application-level without involving the operating system stack. This approach makes the proposed infrastructure a flexible and easily programmable middleware to experiment different scheduling policies in service-oriented scenarios.