GRID COMPUTING

Computer Engineering electronics Engineering Civil Engineering

The popularity of the Internet as well as the availability of powerful computers and high-speed network technologies as low-cost commodity components is changing the way we use computers today. These technology opportunities have led to the possibility of using distributed computers as a single, unified computing resource, leading to what is popularly known as Grid computing. The term Grid is chosen as an analogy to a power Grid that provides consistent, pervasive, dependable, transparent access to electricity irrespective of its source. A detailed analysis of this analogy can be found in. This new approach to network computing is known by several names, such as metacomputing, scalable computing, global computing, Internet computing, and more recently peer-to- peer (P2P) computing. Grids enable the sharing, selection, and aggregation of a wide variety of resources including supercomputers, storage systems, data sources, and specialized devices (see Figure 1)that are geographically distributed and owned by different organizations for solving large-scale computational and data intensive problems in science, engineering, and commerce. Thus creating virtual organizations and enterprises as a temporary alliance of enterprises or organizations that come together to share resources and skills, core competencies, or resources in order to better respond to business opportunities or large-scale application processing requirements, and whose cooperation is supported by computer networks. The concept of Grid computing started as a project to link geographically dispersed supercomputers, but now it has grown far beyond its original intent. The Grid infrastructure can benefit many applications, including collaborative engineering, data exploration, high-throughput computing, and distributed supercomputing. A Grid can be viewed as a seamless, integrated computational and collaborative environment (see Figure 1). The users interact with the Grid resource broker to solve problems, which in turn performs resource discovery, scheduling, and the processing of application jobs on the distributed Grid resources. From the end-user point of view, Grids can be used to provide the following types of services. loading..