GRID TECHNOLOGY

Grid Technology

Grid Technology

Abstract

Geographically distributed hardware, software and information resources. Grid technologies and solutions are being rapidly developed by industry and academia and form the basis of new national (and possibly global).

Keywords

Grid Technology, Grid computing

Introduction

Grid computing (or the use of computational grids) is the combination of computer resources from multiple administrative domains applied to a common task, usually to a scientific, technical or business problem that requires a great number of computer processing cycles or the need to process large amounts of data. One of the main strategies of grid computing is using software to divide and apportion pieces of a program among several computers, sometimes up to many thousands. Grid computing is distributed large-scale cluster computing, as well as a form of network-distributed parallel processing (Berman Anthony Geoffrey 2003 56-81). The size of grid computing may vary from being small confined to a network of computer workstations within a corporation, for example: to being large, public collaboration across many companies and networks. "The notion of a confined grid may also be known as an intra-nodes cooperation whilst the notion of a larger, wider grid may thus refer to an inter-nodes cooperation”. This inter-/intra-nodes cooperation "across cyber-based collaborative organizations are also known as Virtual Organizations" (Smith 2000 56-89).

It is a form of distributed computing whereby a “super and virtual computer” is composed of a cluster of networked loosely coupled computers acting in concert to perform very large tasks. This technology has been applied to computationally intensive scientific, mathematical, and academic problems through volunteer computing, and it is used in commercial enterprises for such diverse applications as drug discovery, economic forecasting, seismic analysis, and back-office data processing in support of e-commerce and Web services.

What distinguishes grid computing from conventional cluster computing systems is that grids tend to be more loosely coupled, heterogeneous, and geographically dispersed. Also, while a computing grid may be dedicated to a specialized application, it is often constructed with the aid of general-purpose grid software libraries and middleware.

Background

The term grid computing originated in the early 1990s as a metaphor for making computer power as easy to access as an electric power grid in Ian Foster's and Carl Kesselman's seminal work, "The Grid: Blueprint for a new computing infrastructure."

CPU scavenging and volunteer computing were popularized beginning in 1997 by distributed.net and later in 1999 by SETI@home to harness the power of networked PCs worldwide, in order to solve CPU-intensive research problems.

The ideas of the grid (including those from distributed computing, object-oriented programming, and Web services) were brought together by Ian Foster, Carl Kesselman, and Steve Tuecke, widely regarded as the "fathers of the grid" (Foster Carl 1999 475-8). They led the effort to create the Globus Toolkit incorporating not just computation management but also storage management, security provisioning, data movement, monitoring, and a toolkit for developing additional services based on the same infrastructure, including agreement negotiation, notification mechanisms, trigger services, and information aggregation. While the Globus Toolkit remains the de facto standard for building grid solutions, a number of other ...