BYG: An Approach to Just-in-Time Gridification of Conventional Java Applications

Abstract

Grid technologies allow developers to run applications with enormous demands for resources such as processing power, data and network bandwidth. However, exploiting Grid resources demands developers to alter their applications to explicitly access the services of specific Grid middlewares. This involves more development effort and requires expertise on Grid programming. A number of recent research efforts among the so-called gridification methods aim to avoid these problems by semi-automatically deriving the Grid-enabled version of an application from its binary code. However, most of these approaches produce coarse-grained Grid applications that prevent programmers from employing tuning mechanisms such as parallelism and distribution, and are rather inflexible, since they were not designed to reuse existing Grid middleware services. To solve these issues, we propose BYG (BYtecode Gridifier), a new gridification method to easily gridify binary Java applications. The chapter describes the prototype implementation of BYG and some experiments showing the feasibility of the approach. Results show that BYG can be used to conveniently gridify and efficiently execute a broad range of computing intensive applications.