Essay About Foundation Of A Grid Solution Design And Important Community Resources

Grid Computing
Essay Preview: Grid Computing
Report this essay
Grid Designing
Abstract: In an increasing number of scientific disciplines, large data
collections are emerging as important community resources. Grid
computing has emerged as an important new field, distinguished from
conventional distributed computing by its focus on large-scale resource
sharing, innovative applications, and, in some cases, high performance
orientation. The foundation of a grid solution design is typically built
upon an existing infrastructure investment. However, a grid solution
does not come to fruition by simply installing software to allocate
resources on demand. The grid solutions are adaptable to meet the needs
of various business problems only because differing types of grids are
designed to meet specific usage requirements and constraints. Different
topologies are designed to meet varying geographical constraints and
network connectivity requirements. The success of a grid solution is
heavily dependant on the amount of thought the IT architect puts into the
solution design. Harnessing these new technologies effectively will
transform scientific disciplines ranging from high-energy physics to the
life sciences. . In this paper, we discuss designing of grid along with
underlying topologies and models that allow for grid computing to work.
Keyword: Virtual organization (VO), Globus tool kit, Grid Security
Infrastructure (GSI).
1 Introduction to grid computing
A grid is a collection of machines, sometimes referred to as
nodes, resources, members, donors, clients, hosts, engines, and
many other such terms. They all contribute any combination of
resources to the grid as a whole. Grid computing is an emerging
computing model that provides the ability to perform higher
throughput computing by taking advantage of many networked
computers to model a virtual computer architecture that is able to
distribute process execution across a parallel infrastructure. Grids
use the resources of many separate computers connected by a
network to solve large-scale computation problems [1]. Grids
provide the ability to perform computations on large data sets, by
breaking them down into many smaller ones, or provide the
ability to perform many more computations at once than would
be possible on a single computer, by modeling a parallel division
of labor between processes. Grid computing involves sharing
heterogeneous resources located in different places belonging to
different administrative domains over a network using open
standards. In short, it involves virtualizing computing resources.
Grid computing is often confused with cluster computing. The
key difference is that a cluster is a single set of nodes sitting in
one location, while a Grid is composed of many clusters and
other kinds of resources. Grid computing reflects a conceptual
framework rather than a physical resource. The Grid approach is
utilized to provision a computational task with administrativelydistant
resources. The focus of Grid technology is associated
with the issues and requirements of flexible computational
provisioning beyond the local administrative domain. A Grid
environment is created to address resource needs. The use of that
resource is usually characterized by its availability outside of the
context of the local administrative domain. This external
provisioning approach entails creating a new administrative
domain referred to as a Virtual Organization (VO) with a distinct
and separate set of administrative policies The context for a Grid
job execution is distinguished by the requirements created when
operating outside of the home administrative context. Grid
technology is employed to facilitate formalizing and complying
with the Grid context associated with your application execution
2. Building grid architecture
Once the functional and non-functional requirements are known,
the IT architect should readily be able to select the type of grid
and the best topology required to satisfy the majority of the
business requirements. When armed with this information, the
high-level grid design will be easier to complete, and by
leveraging the use of known grid types and topologies,
articulating the solution design will require much less effort. It is
important to focus on starting small and to begin building the
basic framework of the design. Rather than setting out to build
the desired end state