Grid computing enables aggregation of distributed resources and transparently access to them. Most production grids such as TeraGrid and EGEE seek to share compute and storage resources distributed across different administrative domains, with their main focus being speeding up a broad range of scientific applications, such as climate modeling, drug design, and protein analysis.
A key aspect of the grid vision realization has been building standard Web services-based protocols that allow distributed resources to be “discovered, accessed, allocated, monitored, accounted for, and billed for, etc., and in general managed as a single virtual system.” The Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) addresses this need for standardization by defining a set of core capabilities and behaviors that address key concerns in grid systems.
Globus Toolkit is a middleware that implements several standard Grid services and over the years has aided the deployment of several service-oriented Grid infrastructures and applications. An ecosystem of tools is available to interact with service grids, including grid brokers, which facilitate user interaction with multiple middleware and implement policies to meet QoS needs.
The development of standardized protocols for several grid computing activities has contributed—theoretically—to allow delivery of on-demand computing services over the Internet. However, ensuring QoS in grids has been perceived as a difficult endeavor. Lack of performance isolation has prevented grids adoption in a variety of scenarios, especially on environments where resources are oversubscribed or users are uncooperative. Activities associated with one user or virtual organization (VO) can influence, in an uncontrollable way, the performance perceived by other users using the same platform. Therefore, the impossibility of enforcing QoS and guaranteeing execution time became a problem, especially for time-critical applications.
Another issue that has lead to frustration when using grids is the availability of resources with diverse software configurations, including disparate operating systems, libraries, compilers, runtime environments, and so forth. At the same time, user applications would often run only on specially customized environments.
Consequently, a portability barrier has often been present on most grid infrastructures, inhibiting users of adopting grids as utility computing environments.
Virtualization technology has been identified as the perfect fit to issues that have caused frustration when using grids, such as hosting many dissimilar software applications on a single physical platform. In this direction, some research projects (e.g., Globus VirtualWorkspaces) aimed at evolving grids to support an additional layer to virtualize computation, storage, and network resources.
Source of Information : Wiley - Cloud Computing Principles and Paradigms 2011
A key aspect of the grid vision realization has been building standard Web services-based protocols that allow distributed resources to be “discovered, accessed, allocated, monitored, accounted for, and billed for, etc., and in general managed as a single virtual system.” The Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) addresses this need for standardization by defining a set of core capabilities and behaviors that address key concerns in grid systems.
Globus Toolkit is a middleware that implements several standard Grid services and over the years has aided the deployment of several service-oriented Grid infrastructures and applications. An ecosystem of tools is available to interact with service grids, including grid brokers, which facilitate user interaction with multiple middleware and implement policies to meet QoS needs.
The development of standardized protocols for several grid computing activities has contributed—theoretically—to allow delivery of on-demand computing services over the Internet. However, ensuring QoS in grids has been perceived as a difficult endeavor. Lack of performance isolation has prevented grids adoption in a variety of scenarios, especially on environments where resources are oversubscribed or users are uncooperative. Activities associated with one user or virtual organization (VO) can influence, in an uncontrollable way, the performance perceived by other users using the same platform. Therefore, the impossibility of enforcing QoS and guaranteeing execution time became a problem, especially for time-critical applications.
Another issue that has lead to frustration when using grids is the availability of resources with diverse software configurations, including disparate operating systems, libraries, compilers, runtime environments, and so forth. At the same time, user applications would often run only on specially customized environments.
Consequently, a portability barrier has often been present on most grid infrastructures, inhibiting users of adopting grids as utility computing environments.
Virtualization technology has been identified as the perfect fit to issues that have caused frustration when using grids, such as hosting many dissimilar software applications on a single physical platform. In this direction, some research projects (e.g., Globus VirtualWorkspaces) aimed at evolving grids to support an additional layer to virtualize computation, storage, and network resources.
Source of Information : Wiley - Cloud Computing Principles and Paradigms 2011
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