1. Grid Computing
Net 535

2. Grid Computing Definations
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.
The definitive definition of a Grid is provided by Ian Foster in his article "What is the Grid?
Computing resources are not administered centrally.
Open standards are used.
Non-trivial quality of service is achieved.
Plaszczak/Wellner define Grid technology as "the technology that enables resource virtualization, on-demand provisioning, and service (resource) sharing between organizations."
IBM : "A Grid is a type of parallel and distributed system that enables the sharing, selection, and aggregation of resources distributed across multiple administrative domains based on the resources availability, capacity, performance, cost and users' quality-of-service requirements"

3. What is Grid Computing
“Grid computing, most simply stated, is distributed computing taken to the next evolutionary level. The goal is to create the illusion of a simple yet large and powerful self managing virtual computer out of a large collection of connected heterogeneous systems sharing various combinations of resources” IBM Redbook .

4. Electrical Power Grid Analogy
users (or electrical appliances) get access to electricity through wall sockets with no care or consideration for where or how the electricity is actually generated.
“The power grid” links together power plants of many different kinds
The Grid Computing
users (or client applications) gain access to computing resources (processors, storage, data, applications, and so on) as needed with little or no knowledge of where those resources are located or what the underlying technologies, hardware, operating system, and so on are
"the Grid" links together computing resources (PCs, workstations, servers, storage elements) and provides the mechanism needed to access them.

5. Properties of the Grid
• Distributed • Dynamic • Heterogeneous • Virtual environment • Collaborative environment • Transparent access to all the available resources

6. Why need Grid Computing?
Core networking technology now accelerates at a much faster rate than advances in microprocessor speeds
Exploiting under utilized resources
Parallel CPU capacity
Virtual resources and virtual organizations for collaboration
Access to additional resources

7. Who needs Grid Computing?
Not just computer scientists…
scientists “hit the wall” when faced with situations:
The amount of data they need is huge and the data is stored in different institutions.
The amount of similar calculations the scientist has to do is huge.
Other areas:
Government
Business
Education
Industrial design
etc
Computational/experimental scientists and engineers
 Control remote instruments
 Access to data repositories and (super)computers
 Visualization and data analysis
Data intensive applications
Collider experiments in particle physics produce petabytes per year
Astronomy digital sky surveys, e.g. the virtual observatory project
Example data grids: NSF GriPhyN, DOE PPDG, EU DataGrid
Industry
 Link people (video conferencing & remote collaboration systems)
 Share resources
 Problem solving
Government
 Public policy making based on collaborative information sharing
 Disaster response using information gathering and decision making
Education
 Virtual classrooms (one-way video conferencing)
 Remote demonstrations and remote access to collections

8. What grid computing can do(1)
Exploiting underutilized resources:
We can use an idle machine elsewhere on the grid to run jobs
Parallel CPU capacity is one of the most attractive features of a grid
Subjobs on different machines
Exploiting underutilization : Most desktop machines are busy less than 5% of the time. In some organizations, even the server
machines can often be relatively idle.
For example, a batch job that spends a significant amount of time processing a set of input
data to produce an output set is perhaps the most ideal and simple use for a grid. If the
quantities of input and output are large, more thought and planning might be required to
efficiently use the grid for such a job. It would usually not make sense to use a word
processor remotely on a grid because there would probably be greater delays and more
potential points of failure.

9. What grid computing can do(2)
Applications
Grid-enabled applications
no practical tools for transforming arbitrary applications to exploit the parallel capabilities of a grid.

10. What grid computing can do(3)
Virtual resources and virtual organizations for collaboration
More capable than distributed computing
Wider audience
Open standards, hence highly heterogeneous systems
Data, equipment, software, services, licenses,…

11. What grid computing can do(3)
Access to additional resources
special equipment, software, licenses, and other services
Resource balancing

12. What grid computing can do(4)
Reliability
Now: redundancy in hardware
Future: Software
Utilize “autonomic computing”

13. Grid concepts and components(1) Types of resources
Computation
Storage
Primary/secondary storage
Mountable networked filed system
AFS, NFS, DFS, GPFS
Capacity increase
Uniform name space
Data Stripping

14. Grid concepts and components(2) Types of resources (cont)
Communications
Redundant communication paths
Special equipment, capacities, architectures, and policies
different architectures, operating systems, devices, capacities, and equipment.
Jobs and applications
Application is a collection of jobs
Specific dependencies

15. Grid concepts and components(3) Types of resources (cont)
Scheduling, reservation, and scavenging
scheduler
automatically finds the most appropriate machine on which to run any given job
scavenging
report its idle status to the grid management node.
Reserved
dedicated resources

16. Grid concepts and components(4)
Intragrid to Intergrid
cluster
same hardware/software
Intragrid
heterogeneous machines/software
multiple department/same organization
Intergrid
multiple department/multiple organization

17. Grid User Roles ---A User’s Perspective
Enrolling and installing grid software
Logging onto the grid
Queries and submitting jobs
Data configuration
Monitoring progress and recovery
Reserving resources

18. Grid User Roles ---An Administrator’s Perspective
Planning
Installation
Managing enrollment of donors and users
Certificate authority
Resource management
Data sharing

19. Using a grid: An application developer’s perspective(1)
Applications that are not enabled for using multiple processors but can be executed on different machines.
Applications that are already designed to use the multiple processors of a grid setting.

20. Using a grid: An application developer’s perspective(2)
Globus
developer’s toolkit
Manage grid operations
Measurement
Repair
Debug grid applications
Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA)

21. Grid Architecture GRID Internet Application Application Collective
Resource
Transport
Connectivity
Internet
Fabric
Link

22. Grid Architecture
Fabric layer: Provides the resources to which shared access is mediated by Grid protocols.
Connectivity layer: Defines the core communication and authentication protocols required for grid-specific network functions.
Resource layer: Defines protocols, APIs, and SDKs for secure negotiations, initiation, monitoring control, accounting and payment of sharing operations on individual resources.
Collective Layer: Contains protocols and services that capture interactions among a collection of resources.
Application Layer: These are user applications that operate within VO (Virtual Organization ) environment.
Grid Computing

23. Standards for Grid Environments
Global Grid Forum (GGF)
Organization for the Advancement of Structured
Information Standards (OASIS) open.org/
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF)
Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS- I)

24. Globus Toolkit v5
The Globus Alliance is made up of organizations and individuals that develop and make available various technologies applicable to grid computing.
The Globus toolkit v5 includes software for security, information infrastructure, resource management, data management, communication, fault detection, and portability. It is packaged as a set of components that can be used either independently or together to develop applications.
For more information visit

25. Finally
grid computing assumes and/or requires technologies that include:
Support for executing programs on a variety of platforms
A secure infrastructure
Data movement/replication/federation
Resource discovery
Resource management

26. References Introduction to Grid Computing IBM Redbook
The Grid 2: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure, 2nd Edition from Ian Foster, Carl Kesselman.
The Anatomy of the Grid: Enabling Scalable Virtual Organizations by I. Foster, C. Kesselman and S. Tuecke , International J. Supercomputer Applications, 15(3), pers/anatomy.pdf