Grid Computing Done by: Shamsa Amur Al-Matani

Introduction: “Grid computing is a technology used to harness computing powers from various sources and use them in harmony to achieve a specific goal. The great advantage of grid computing is the ability to significantly reduce the time that is taken to accomplish that goal, thereby increasing efficiency.” (1)

What is Grid? What is Computing? A grid is a pattern of horizontal and vertical lines spaced out at regular intervals, forming squares or rectangles. What is Computing? The process of utilizing computer technology to complete a task. Computing may involve computer hardware and/or software, but must involve some form of a computer system. Most individuals use some forms of computing every day whether they realize it or not. Sending an email, or using a cell phone can all be considered forms of computing.

Definition of Grid Computing: Grid computing is a form of networking. Unlike conventional networks that focus on communication among devices, grid computing harnesses unused processing cycles of all computers in a network for solving problems too intensive for any stand-alone machine.

These computers join together to create a virtual supercomputers These computers join together to create a virtual supercomputers. Networked computers can work on the same problems, traditionally reserved for supercomputers, and yet this network of computers are more powerful than the super computers built in the seventies and eighties. Modern supercomputers are built on the principles of grid computing, incorporating many smaller computers into a larger whole.

It has the ability to distribute jobs to many smaller server components using load sharing software that distributes the load evenly based on resource availability and policies. Now instead of having one heavily burdened server the load can be spread evenly across many smaller computers. The distributed nature of grid computing is transparent to the user. When a user submits a job they don't have to think about which machine their job is going to get executed on. The "grid software" will perform the necessary calculations and decide where to send the job based on policies. Many research institutions are using some sort of grid computing to address complex computational challenges. This post talks about how you can volunteer your workstation to be part of a grid that attempts to solve some of the world's biggest challenges.

Components of grid computing:

How Grid Computer works? “Grid computing technology is relatively new, is a work in progress, and can be applied in many different ways. A person or a company might use it to request that a complex computational problem be solved using the grid, or to get the combined computing resources of the grid to solve some other problem. First, the person or company sends a request to the grid with details of the problem that needs to be solved. This can be sent in a variety of ways, including over the Internet using a web form. The request can be sent to the grid using XML.” (3)

Security Problems Authentication Cryptography Grid computation shares resources online through the internet, so anyone may access shared resources. Therefore, information security has been very important in the grid computation area. The basic idea of controlling access to shared resources is through authentication. The simplest authentication design is to set up a username and password for the user to join a VO. Over time, the authorization framework and architecture design have been popular research topics in grid computation to ensure better information security. Cryptography To prevent unwanted users from stealing information, encryption has been widely used for data transmission. A special cryptography can be designed for each VO to transfer data online. Even if information is stolen by unwanted users, they must have the cryptography scheme or key to decode the data in order to view it.

Future work Grid computation is a proven to an expensive supercomputer for doing parallel computation. Though grid computation is still in the development stage, and most projects are still voluntary and experimental, it has developed very quickly and more and more scientists have worked hard to improve its efficiency and security. The most powerful way to use grid computation would be to use all the computers in the world online. There are millions of computers online in the world everyday, some of which may just stay idle, while others are busy running programs 24 hours per day. If we can share all of the computer resources worldwide to perform some complicated computation, we will save a tremendous amount of money and time. However, with more and more computers involved in grid computation, the security problems will become increasingly serious. How to design the largest global virtual environment for grid computation is the most important issue when trying to employ all possible computer resources on earth.

References: http://www.brighthub.com/environment/green-computing/articles/67601.aspx#0_undefined,0_ http://computer.howstuffworks.com/grid-computing.htm http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/web-applications-and-services/0789736268/how-grid- computing-works/ch26lev1sec1