Using AOP to bring a project back in shape: The OurGrid case

eScience is rapidly changing the way we do research. As a result, many research labs now need non-trivial computational power. Grid and voluntary computing are well-established solutions for this need. However, not all labs can effectively benefit from these technologies. In particular, small and medium research labs (which are the majority of the labs in the world) have a hard time using these technologies as they demand high visibility projects and/or high-qualified computer personnel. This paper describes OurGrid, a system designed to fill this gap. OurGrid is an open, free-to-join, cooperative Grid in which labs donate their idle computational resources in exchange for accessing other labs' idle resources when needed. It relies on an incentive mechanism that makes it in the best interest of participants to collaborate with the system, employs a novel application scheduling technique that demands very little information, and uses virtual machines to isolate applications and thus provide security. The vision is that OurGrid enables labs to combine their resources in a massive worldwide computing platform. OurGrid is in production since December 2004. Any lab can join it by downloading its software from http://www.ourgrid.org.

show abstract

“…We here summarize how we addressed these problems. Readers interested in a detailed discussion of this experience should refer to [25].…”

Section: Software Engineering Grid Middlewarementioning

confidence: 99%

Labs of the World, Unite!!!

et al. 2006

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…• The Application Monitor pattern was also observed in the OurGrid project while applying a strategy to improve its tests based on AOP [5]. As the OurGrid middleware is multithreaded, it was difficult to provide deterministic tests for it, because a better control of the application threads was necessary for that.…”

Section: Known Usesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The application monitor aspect pattern

Coelho

Dantas

Kulesza

et al. 2006

Proceedings of the 2006 Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Modern applications are typically complex, multithreaded, distributed, and often should provide real-time responses and small-footprint. Due to such characteristics, most often, it is hard to understand the behavior of such systems and consequently detect the root causes of performance or reliability problems. In order to collect information about system's runtime behavioroperations' performance, internal threads status -the system developer is required to instrument the target application (and sometimes also its execution platform). Such monitoring code which allows the developer to reason about the code execution is not localized in a single application module; it must be included in many modules. As a consequence, the monitoring concern tends to be scattered across multiple application/platform modules and tangled with other application concerns. The Application Monitor pattern supports the separate definition of monitoringrelated functionalities concerns through the use of aspect-oriented programming. It decouples such concerns from the implementation of application-specific concerns, which in turn improves the system reusability and maintainability.

show abstract

“…While developing the OurGrid system, an open source peer-to-peer grid middleware, we have improved our tests by providing to test developers a class with an operation called waitUntilWorkIsDone [3]. This operation made the test thread wait until all other threads started by the test were waiting or have finished.…”

Section: A Generic Approach: Threadcontrolfortestsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The closest related work is [3], in which we discuss how AOP has been used to help in the testing process of the OurGrid project. In that work we have proposed the waitUntilWorkIsDone operation in which there was only one system state configuration to wait for (all threads started by the test have finished or are waiting).…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Improving Automated Testing of Multi-threaded Software

Dantas¹,

Brasileiro²,

Cirne³

2008

2008 International Conference on Software Testing, Verification, and Validation

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper discusses an approach to avoid incorrect results in the execution of automatic tests of multi-threaded systems. We argue that such incorrect results have two main sources. First, it is typically difficult to determine when all threads have finished processing and thus when it is safe to perform the test assertions. Second, background threads can change the system state while assertions are being performed, thus producing non-deterministic results. The main contributions of this work are: (i) a generic approach that ensures that test assertions are performed in a safe moment; (ii) implementation details of such an approach using Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP); and (iii) an evaluation of the proposed approach.

show abstract

Using AOP to bring a project back in shape: The OurGrid case

Abstract: Abstract

Cited by 5 publications

References 28 publications

Labs of the World, Unite!!!

Labs of the World, Unite!!!

The application monitor aspect pattern

Improving Automated Testing of Multi-threaded Software

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About