A Distributed Abstract State Machine for Grid Systems: A Preliminary Study

Grid systems technology has evolved over recent years and the Open Grid Service Architecture (OGSA) has rapidly become the "de facto" standard. OGSA includes several important capabilities needed to support Grid applications and, among them, the job management and execution capability, which concern searching candidate locations and executing and managing jobs until end. Such functionalities enable users to use distributed resources for their applications. These tasks are critical in the Grid system context because their incorrect execution can heavily affect provided services, so adoption of formal method is sometimes mandatory. This paper is aimed at defining an abstract model for specifying the job management and execution services. We propose a Distributed Abstract State Machine (DASM) model to analyse and design OGSA capability and its implementation in coreASM.