Adopting the DSM paradigm: Defining federation scenarios through resource brokers for experimentally driven research

Federation scenarios for experimentally driven research usually involve resources offered by a diverse pool of organizations. Federation can be done by a resource broker, which has no resources of its own. Instead the broker matches customer's requested services and providers resources based on the SLA required by the end-user. The end-user has no knowledge that the broker does not control the resources. This work considers the concepts of modeling and meta-modeling to define a resource broker and to specify federation scenarios by applying the Domain Specific Modeling (DSM) paradigm. Moreover, we acknowledge the fact that resource models already exist and we adopt model to model transformations. We argue that defining a resource broker meta-model, focusing on the federation domain and applying DSM practices is necessary in order to: i) create formal description of a resource broker and its resource providers with its offered services and resources, ii) have valid, comprehensible and unambiguous configurations that support federation scenarios, iii) simplify the combination of services and resources from third parties that are non-conformant to the meta-model and iv) have common definitions and understanding by the resource federation domain, thus being efficient and practicable. We present a family of Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) having the meta-model as their abstract syntax, for defining model entities, describing a resource broker and federation scenarios between organizations. Additionally, prototype tooling supports the DSLs and the proposed framework.