A Reference Model for Grid Architectures and Its Analysis

Computing and data intensive applications in physics, medicine, biology, graphics, and business intelligence require large and distributed infrastructures to address today’s and tomorrow’s challenges. For example, process mining applications are faced with terrabytes of event data and computationally expensive algorithms. Increasingly, computer grids are used to deal with such challenges. However, despite the availability of many software packages for grid applications, a good conceptual model of the grid is missing. Grid computing is often approached in an ad-hoc and engineering-like manner. This paper provides formal description of the grid in terms of a colored Petri net (CPN). The CPN can be seen as a reference model for grids and clarifies the basic concepts at a conceptual level. Moreover, the CPN allows for various kinds of analysis ranging from verification to performance analysis. In this paper, we show that our reference model allows for the analysis of various distribution strategies using simulation.