Using Continuations for Flexible Provision of Grid Services

The main challenge of grid computing is to provide a unified computational infrastructure composed of networked heterogeneous resources that makes effective use of the computational power delivered by each resource. To reach this objective management of computational resources is a crucial aspect because of the decentralized, heterogeneous and autonomous nature of these resources that usually belong to different administrative domains. As such they cannot be managed by adopting a centralized approach, but more sophisticated computing methodologies are necessary. In this context, the possibility to manage the execution of services is advisable to control their provision in dynamic and changing environments. 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 adapt the execution of services according to both the changing conditions of the environment where they operate in, and the requirements of service users. The infrastructure is based on continuations, a programming paradigm that allows to control the state of code execution at programming level without directly using operating system facilities.