Using AOP to monitor and administer software for grid computing environments

Monitoring is a task of collecting measurements that reflect the state of a system. Administration is a collection of tasks for control and manipulation of computer systems. Monitoring and Administering computer Resources (MARS) in a distributed grid computing environment (i.e. a distributed environment for coordinated resource sharing and problem solving in dynamic, multi-institutional virtual organizations) is an important, expensive, and critical task. We present a novel solution based on applying crosscuts using binary rewriters and an event-based model that allows developers to create non-trivial MARS programs easily and uniformly. Our approach converts low-level API resource calls into system-wide events that MARS programs can monitor. This is accomplished by introducing advice that contains event-generating code at join points in programs that represent computer resources. We categorize low-level resource APIs by imposing a transactional metaphor to simplify the complexity of interactions between resources and to enable reasoning about MARS programs. We report both a case study and simulation that supports the viability of our approach.