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

Grid technologies allow developers to run applications wit h enormous demands for resources such as processing power, data and net work bandwidth. However, exploiting Grid resources demands developers to G rid-aware their applications by explicitly accessing the services of specific Grid middlewares, which involves more development effort and requires expertise on Grid programming. A number of recent research efforts known as gridification methodsaim to avoid these problems by semi-automatically deriving the Grid-en abled version of an application based on either its source code or binary code. Mos t of the approaches belonging to the second group produce coarse-grained Grid a pplic tions that prevent programmers from employing tuning mechanisms such as p arallelism and distribution, and are rather inflexible, since they were not des igned to reuse existing Grid middleware services. We present BYG (BYtecode Gridifie r), a new gridification method that allow developers to easily gridify binar y Java applications and solves these issues. The paper describes the prototype impl mentation of BYG and some experiments showing the feasibility of the approach. E xperiments show that BYG can be used to transparently gridify and efficiently exec ut a broad range of resource-intensive applications.