Expressing Adaptivity and Context Awareness in the ASSISTANT Programming Model

Pervasive Grid computing platforms are composed of a variety of fixed and mobile nodes, interconnected through multiple wireless and wired network technologies. Pervasive Grid Applications must adapt themselves to the state of their surrounding environment (context), which includes the state of the resources on which they are executed. By focusing on a specific instance of emergency management application, we show how a complex high-performance problem can be solved according to multiple parallelization methodologies. We introduce the ASSISTANT programming model which allows programmers to express multiple versions of a same parallel module, each of them suitable for particular context situations. We show how the exemplified programs can be included in a single ASSISTANT parallel module and how their dynamic switching can be expressed. We provide experimental results demonstrating the effectiveness of the approach.