Negotiation Protocol for Agile and Reliable E-science Collaboration

We present a negotiation protocol based on contract law to enable agile and reliable e-Science collaboration. It is designed to be compatible with existing models of resource sharing, but focuses on forming and dissolving collaborations in a lightweight and dynamic manner. It allows the collaboration within the resource users to be separated from the interaction with resource providers, arguing that this is more efficient in forming shorter term collaboration. The protocol aims at managing the whole collaboration lifecycle. We describe the formal specification of the protocol, along with its verification via a model checker. The protocol is generic, and can be used for accessing any type of resource provided via any existing e-Science resource provision models (e.g. grids, clouds, and clusters).