Generic application description model: toward automatic deployment of applications on computational grids

Computational grids promise to deliver a huge computer power as transparently as the electric power grid supplies electricity. Thus, applications need to be automatically deployed on computational grids. However, various types of applications may be run on a grid, so it may not be wise to design an automatic deployment tool for each specific programming model. This paper promotes a generic application description model which can express several specific application descriptions. Translating a specific application description into our generic description is a simple task. Then, developing new planning algorithms and re-using them for different application types will be much easier. Moreover, our generic description model allows to deploy applications based on a programming model combining several models, as parallel components encompass component-based and parallel programming models for instance. Our generic description model is implemented in an automatic deployment tool which can deploy CCM and MPICH-G2 applications.