Real-time transaction processing for autonomic Grid applications

The future Grid will be an autonomic environment that can not only assist users to share large-scale resources and accomplish collaborative tasks but also self-manage to reduce the users' interventions as much as possible. In such an autonomic Grid environment, the real-time transaction processing is a key and challenging technology to protect systems from various failures. This paper presents an autonomic real-time transaction service (ARTTS) that can (1) dynamically discover Grid services as participants to execute specified sub-transactions, (2) coordinate these participants to achieve the real-time and transactional requirements, and (3) assign priorities to schedule concurrent transactions. Petri nets are used to model and validate the coordination algorithms of real-time Grid transactions and experiment result demonstrates the feasibility of the ARTTS and the performance of the algorithms in different workloads. By handling the potential failures and exceptions autonomically, the ARTTS can facilitate the implementation of real-time Grid transactions and simplify the system management work, which frees users from the complex interference in the autonomic Grid environment. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.