GAUGE:: Grid Automation and Generative Environment

The Grid has proven to be a successful paradigm for distributed computing. However, constructing applications that exploit all the benefits that the Grid offers is still not optimal for both inexperienced and experienced users. Recent approaches to solving this problem employ a high-level abstract layer to ease the construction of applications for different Grid environments. These approaches help facilitate construction of Grid applications, but they are still tied to specific programming languages or platforms. A new approach is presented in this paper that uses concepts of domain-specific modeling (DSM) to build a high-level abstract layer. With this DSM-based abstract layer, the users are able to create Grid applications without knowledge of specific programming languages or being bound to specific Grid platforms. An additional benefit of DSM provides the capability to generate software artifacts for various Grid environments. This paper presents the Grid Automation and Generative Environment (GAUGE). The goal of GAUGE is to automate the generation of Grid applications to allow inexperienced users to exploit the Grid fully. At the same time, GAUGE provides an open framework in which experienced users can build upon and extend to tailor their applications to particular Grid environments or specific platforms. GAUGE employs domain-specific modeling techniques to accomplish this challenging task. Copyright (c) 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.