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Grid computing is the use of widely distributed
computer A computer is a machine that can be programmed to carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations ( computation) automatically. Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic sets of operations known as programs. These prog ...
resources to reach a common goal. A computing grid can be thought of as a distributed system with non-interactive workloads that involve many files. Grid computing is distinguished from conventional high-performance computing systems such as
cluster may refer to: Science and technology Astronomy * Cluster (spacecraft), constellation of four European Space Agency spacecraft * Asteroid cluster, a small asteroid family * Cluster II (spacecraft), a European Space Agency mission to study th ...
computing in that grid computers have each node set to perform a different task/application. Grid computers also tend to be more
heterogeneous Homogeneity and heterogeneity are concepts often used in the sciences and statistics relating to the uniformity of a substance or organism. A material or image that is homogeneous is uniform in composition or character (i.e. color, shape, siz ...
and geographically dispersed (thus not physically coupled) than cluster computers. Although a single grid can be dedicated to a particular application, commonly a grid is used for a variety of purposes. Grids are often constructed with general-purpose grid
middleware Middleware is a type of computer software that provides services to software applications beyond those available from the operating system. It can be described as "software glue". Middleware makes it easier for software developers to implement ...
software libraries. Grid sizes can be quite large. Grids are a form of
distributed computing A distributed system is a system whose components are located on different networked computers, which communicate and coordinate their actions by passing messages to one another from any system. Distributed computing is a field of computer sci ...
composed of many networked loosely coupled computers acting together to perform large tasks. For certain applications, distributed or grid computing can be seen as a special type of
parallel computing Parallel computing is a type of computation in which many calculations or processes are carried out simultaneously. Large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which can then be solved at the same time. There are several different f ...
that relies on complete computers (with onboard CPUs, storage, power supplies, network interfaces, etc.) connected to a
computer network A computer network is a set of computers sharing resources located on or provided by network nodes. The computers use common communication protocols over digital interconnections to communicate with each other. These interconnections are ...
(private or public) by a conventional network interface, such as
Ethernet Ethernet () is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 1 ...
. This is in contrast to the traditional notion of a
supercomputer A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second ( FLOPS) instead of million instructio ...
, which has many processors connected by a local high-speed
computer bus In computer architecture, a bus (shortened form of the Latin '' omnibus'', and historically also called data highway or databus) is a communication system that transfers data between components inside a computer, or between computers. This e ...
. This technology has been applied to computationally intensive scientific, mathematical, and academic problems through volunteer computing, and it is used in commercial enterprises for such diverse applications as
drug discovery In the fields of medicine, biotechnology and pharmacology, drug discovery is the process by which new candidate medications are discovered. Historically, drugs were discovered by identifying the active ingredient from traditional remedies or b ...
,
economic forecasting Economic forecasting is the process of making predictions about the economy. Forecasts can be carried out at a high level of aggregation—for example for GDP, inflation, unemployment or the fiscal deficit—or at a more disaggregated level, for ...
, seismic analysis, and back office data processing in support for
e-commerce E-commerce (electronic commerce) is the activity of electronically buying or selling of products on online services or over the Internet. E-commerce draws on technologies such as mobile commerce, electronic funds transfer, supply chain manag ...
and Web services. Grid computing combines computers from multiple administrative domains to reach a common goal, to solve a single task, and may then disappear just as quickly. The size of a grid may vary from small—confined to a network of computer workstations within a corporation, for example—to large, public collaborations across many companies and networks. "The notion of a confined grid may also be known as an intra-nodes cooperation whereas the notion of a larger, wider grid may thus refer to an inter-nodes cooperation". Coordinating applications on Grids can be a complex task, especially when coordinating the flow of information across distributed computing resources. Grid workflow systems have been developed as a specialized form of a workflow management system designed specifically to compose and execute a series of computational or data manipulation steps, or a workflow, in the grid context.


Comparison of grids and conventional supercomputers

“Distributed” or “grid” computing in general is a special type of
parallel computing Parallel computing is a type of computation in which many calculations or processes are carried out simultaneously. Large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which can then be solved at the same time. There are several different f ...
that relies on complete computers (with onboard CPUs, storage, power supplies, network interfaces, etc.) connected to a
network Network, networking and networked may refer to: Science and technology * Network theory, the study of graphs as a representation of relations between discrete objects * Network science, an academic field that studies complex networks Mathematic ...
(private, public or the
Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, p ...
) by a conventional network interface producing commodity hardware, compared to the lower efficiency of designing and constructing a small number of custom supercomputers. The primary performance disadvantage is that the various processors and local storage areas do not have high-speed connections. This arrangement is thus well-suited to applications in which multiple parallel computations can take place independently, without the need to communicate intermediate results between processors. The high-end scalability of geographically dispersed grids is generally favorable, due to the low need for connectivity between nodes relative to the capacity of the public Internet. There are also some differences in programming and MC. It can be costly and difficult to write programs that can run in the environment of a supercomputer, which may have a custom operating system, or require the program to address concurrency issues. If a problem can be adequately parallelized, a “thin” layer of “grid” infrastructure can allow conventional, standalone programs, given a different part of the same problem, to run on multiple machines. This makes it possible to write and debug on a single conventional machine and eliminates complications due to multiple instances of the same program running in the same shared
memory Memory is the faculty of the mind by which data or information is encoded, stored, and retrieved when needed. It is the retention of information over time for the purpose of influencing future action. If past events could not be remember ...
and storage space at the same time.


Design considerations and variations

One feature of distributed grids is that they can be formed from computing resources belonging to one or more multiple individuals or organizations (known as multiple
administrative domain An administrative domain is a service provider holding a security repository permitting to easily authenticate and authorize clients with credentials. This particularly applies to computer network security. This concept is captured by the 'Admi ...
s). This can facilitate commercial transactions, as in utility computing, or make it easier to assemble volunteer computing networks. One disadvantage of this feature is that the computers which are actually performing the calculations might not be entirely trustworthy. The designers of the system must thus introduce measures to prevent malfunctions or malicious participants from producing false, misleading, or erroneous results, and from using the system as an attack vector. This often involves assigning work randomly to different nodes (presumably with different owners) and checking that at least two different nodes report the same answer for a given work unit. Discrepancies would identify malfunctioning and malicious nodes. However, due to the lack of central control over the hardware, there is no way to guarantee that nodes will not drop out of the network at random times. Some nodes (like laptops or
dial-up Dial-up Internet access is a form of Internet access that uses the facilities of the public switched telephone network (PSTN) to establish a connection to an Internet service provider (ISP) by dialing a telephone number on a conventional telepho ...
Internet customers) may also be available for computation but not network communications for unpredictable periods. These variations can be accommodated by assigning large work units (thus reducing the need for continuous network connectivity) and reassigning work units when a given node fails to report its results in expected time. Another set of what could be termed social compatibility issues in the early days of grid computing related to the goals of grid developers to carry their innovation beyond the original field of high-performance computing and across disciplinary boundaries into new fields, like that of high-energy physics. The impacts of trust and availability on performance and development difficulty can influence the choice of whether to deploy onto a dedicated cluster, to idle machines internal to the developing organization, or to an open external network of volunteers or contractors. In many cases, the participating nodes must trust the central system not to abuse the access that is being granted, by interfering with the operation of other programs, mangling stored information, transmitting private data, or creating new security holes. Other systems employ measures to reduce the amount of trust “client” nodes must place in the central system such as placing applications in virtual machines. Public systems or those crossing administrative domains (including different departments in the same organization) often result in the need to run on
heterogeneous Homogeneity and heterogeneity are concepts often used in the sciences and statistics relating to the uniformity of a substance or organism. A material or image that is homogeneous is uniform in composition or character (i.e. color, shape, siz ...
systems, using different
operating systems An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...
and hardware architectures. With many languages, there is a trade-off between investment in software development and the number of platforms that can be supported (and thus the size of the resulting network).
Cross-platform In computing, cross-platform software (also called multi-platform software, platform-agnostic software, or platform-independent software) is computer software that is designed to work in several computing platforms. Some cross-platform software ...
languages can reduce the need to make this tradeoff, though potentially at the expense of high performance on any given
node In general, a node is a localized swelling (a " knot") or a point of intersection (a vertex). Node may refer to: In mathematics * Vertex (graph theory), a vertex in a mathematical graph * Vertex (geometry), a point where two or more curves, line ...
(due to run-time interpretation or lack of optimization for the particular platform). Various
middleware Middleware is a type of computer software that provides services to software applications beyond those available from the operating system. It can be described as "software glue". Middleware makes it easier for software developers to implement ...
projects have created generic infrastructure to allow diverse scientific and commercial projects to harness a particular associated grid or for the purpose of setting up new grids. BOINC is a common one for various academic projects seeking public volunteers; more are listed at the end of the article. In fact, the middleware can be seen as a layer between the hardware and the software. On top of the middleware, a number of technical areas have to be considered, and these may or may not be middleware independent. Example areas include SLA management, Trust, and Security,
Virtual organization A virtual organization is a temporary or permanent collection of geographically dispersed individuals, groups, organizational units, or entire organizations that depend on electronic linking in order to complete the production process (working defi ...
management, License Management, Portals and Data Management. These technical areas may be taken care of in a commercial solution, though the cutting edge of each area is often found within specific research projects examining the field.


Market segmentation of the grid computing market

For the segmentation of the grid computing market, two perspectives need to be considered: the provider side and the user side:


The provider side

The overall grid market comprises several specific markets. These are the grid middleware market, the market for grid-enabled applications, the utility computing market, and the software-as-a-service (SaaS) market. Grid
middleware Middleware is a type of computer software that provides services to software applications beyond those available from the operating system. It can be described as "software glue". Middleware makes it easier for software developers to implement ...
is a specific software product, which enables the sharing of heterogeneous resources, and Virtual Organizations. It is installed and integrated into the existing infrastructure of the involved company or companies and provides a special layer placed among the heterogeneous infrastructure and the specific user applications. Major grid middlewares are
Globus Toolkit The Globus Toolkit is an open-source toolkit for grid computing developed and provided by the Globus Alliance. On 25 May 2017 it was announced that the open source support for the project would be discontinued in January 201 due to a lack of fi ...
, gLite, and UNICORE. Utility computing is referred to as the provision of grid computing and applications as service either as an open grid utility or as a hosting solution for one organization or a VO. Major players in the utility computing market are
Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, t ...
, IBM, and HP. Grid-enabled applications are specific software applications that can utilize grid infrastructure. This is made possible by the use of grid middleware, as pointed out above.
Software as a service Software as a service (SaaS ) is a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted. SaaS is also known as "on-demand software" and Web-based/Web-hosted software. SaaS is co ...
(SaaS) is “software that is owned, delivered and managed remotely by one or more providers.” (
Gartner Gartner, Inc is a technological research and consulting firm based in Stamford, Connecticut that conducts research on technology and shares this research both through private consulting as well as executive programs and conferences. Its client ...
2007) Additionally, SaaS applications are based on a single set of common code and data definitions. They are consumed in a one-to-many model, and SaaS uses a Pay As You Go (PAYG) model or a subscription model that is based on usage. Providers of SaaS do not necessarily own the computing resources themselves, which are required to run their SaaS. Therefore, SaaS providers may draw upon the utility computing market. The utility computing market provides computing resources for SaaS providers.


The user side

For companies on the demand or user side of the grid computing market, the different segments have significant implications for their IT deployment strategy. The IT deployment strategy as well as the type of IT investments made are relevant aspects for potential grid users and play an important role for grid adoption.


CPU scavenging

CPU-scavenging, cycle-scavenging, or shared computing creates a “grid” from the idle resources in a network of participants (whether worldwide or internal to an organization). Typically, this technique exploits the 'spare' instruction cycles resulting from the intermittent inactivity that typically occurs at night, during lunch breaks, or even during the (comparatively minuscule, though numerous) moments of idle waiting that modern desktop CPU's experience throughout the day ( when the computer is waiting on IO from the user, network, or storage). In practice, participating computers also donate some supporting amount of disk storage space, RAM, and network bandwidth, in addition to raw CPU power. Many volunteer computing projects, such as BOINC, use the CPU scavenging model. Since nodes are likely to go "offline" from time to time, as their owners use their resources for their primary purpose, this model must be designed to handle such contingencies. Creating an Opportunistic Environment is another implementation of CPU-scavenging where special workload management system harvests the idle desktop computers for compute-intensive jobs, it also refers as Enterprise Desktop Grid (EDG). For instance,
HTCondor HTCondor is an open-source high-throughput computing software framework for coarse-grained distributed parallelization of computationally intensive tasks. It can be used to manage workload on a dedicated cluster of computers, or to farm out wor ...
(the open-source high-throughput computing software framework for coarse-grained distributed rationalization of computationally intensive tasks) can be configured to only use desktop machines where the keyboard and mouse are idle to effectively harness wasted CPU power from otherwise idle desktop workstations. Like other full-featured batch systems, HTCondor provides a job queueing mechanism, scheduling policy, priority scheme, resource monitoring, and resource management. It can be used to manage workload on a dedicated cluster of computers as well or it can seamlessly integrate both dedicated resources (rack-mounted clusters) and non-dedicated desktop machines (cycle scavenging) into one computing environment.


History

The term ''grid computing'' originated in the early 1990s as a
metaphor A metaphor is a figure of speech that, for rhetorical effect, directly refers to one thing by mentioning another. It may provide (or obscure) clarity or identify hidden similarities between two different ideas. Metaphors are often compared wi ...
for making computer power as easy to access as an electric
power grid An electrical grid is an interconnected network for electricity delivery from producers to consumers. Electrical grids vary in size and can cover whole countries or continents. It consists of:Kaplan, S. M. (2009). Smart Grid. Electrical Power ...
. The power grid metaphor for accessible computing quickly became canonical when Ian Foster and
Carl Kesselman Carl Kesselman is an American computer scientist specializing in grid computing technologies. This term was developed by him and professor Ian Foster in the book ''The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure''. He and Foster are winners ...
published their seminal work, "The Grid: Blueprint for a new computing infrastructure" (1999). This was preceded by decades by the metaphor of utility computing (1961): computing as a public utility, analogous to the phone system. CPU scavenging and volunteer computing were popularized beginning in 1997 by distributed.net and later in 1999 by SETI@home to harness the power of networked PCs worldwide, in order to solve CPU-intensive research problems. The ideas of the grid (including those from distributed computing, object-oriented programming, and Web services) were brought together by Ian Foster and Steve Tuecke of the
University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...
, and
Carl Kesselman Carl Kesselman is an American computer scientist specializing in grid computing technologies. This term was developed by him and professor Ian Foster in the book ''The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure''. He and Foster are winners ...
of the
University of Southern California , mottoeng = "Let whoever earns the palm bear it" , religious_affiliation = Nonsectarian—historically Methodist , established = , accreditation = WSCUC , type = Private research university , academic_affiliations = , endowment = $8.1 ...
's
Information Sciences Institute The USC Information Sciences Institute (ISI) is a component of the University of Southern California (USC) Viterbi School of Engineering, and specializes in research and development in information processing, computing, and communications tech ...
. The trio, who led the effort to create the
Globus Toolkit The Globus Toolkit is an open-source toolkit for grid computing developed and provided by the Globus Alliance. On 25 May 2017 it was announced that the open source support for the project would be discontinued in January 201 due to a lack of fi ...
, is widely regarded as the "fathers of the grid". The toolkit incorporates not just computation management but also storage management, security provisioning, data movement, monitoring, and a toolkit for developing additional services based on the same infrastructure, including agreement negotiation, notification mechanisms, trigger services, and information aggregation. While the Globus Toolkit remains the de facto standard for building grid solutions, a number of other tools have been built that answer some subset of services needed to create an enterprise or global grid. In 2007 the term
cloud computing Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage ( cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over mu ...
came into popularity, which is conceptually similar to the canonical Foster definition of grid computing (in terms of computing resources being consumed as electricity is from the
power grid An electrical grid is an interconnected network for electricity delivery from producers to consumers. Electrical grids vary in size and can cover whole countries or continents. It consists of:Kaplan, S. M. (2009). Smart Grid. Electrical Power ...
) and earlier utility computing.


Progress

In November 2006, Seidel received the
Sidney Fernbach Award The Sidney Fernbach Award established in 1992 by the IEEE Computer Society, in memory of Sidney Fernbach, one of the pioneers in the development and application of high performance computers for the solution of large computational problems as the D ...
at the Supercomputing Conference in
Tampa, Florida Tampa () is a city on the Gulf Coast of the U.S. state of Florida. The city's borders include the north shore of Tampa Bay and the east shore of Old Tampa Bay. Tampa is the largest city in the Tampa Bay area and the seat of Hillsborough ...
. "For outstanding contributions to the development of software for HPC and Grid computing to enable the collaborative numerical investigation of complex problems in physics; in particular, modeling black hole collisions." This award, which is one of the highest honors in computing, was awarded for his achievements in numerical relativity.


Fastest virtual supercomputers

* As of April 7, 2020, BOINC – 29.8 PFLOPS. * As of March 2020, Folding@home – 1.1 exaFLOPS. * As of November 2019, IceCube via OSG – 350 fp32 PFLOPS. * As of February 2018,
Einstein@Home Einstein@Home is a volunteer computing project that searches for signals from spinning neutron stars in data from gravitational-wave detectors, from large radio telescopes, and from a gamma-ray telescope. Neutron stars are detected by their pul ...
 – 3.489 PFLOPS. * As of April 7, 2020, SETI@Home – 1.11 PFLOPS. * As of April 7, 2020, MilkyWay@Home – 1.465 PFLOPS. * As of March 2019, GIMPS – 0.558 PFLOPS. Also, as of March 2019, the Bitcoin Network had a measured computing power equivalent to over 80,000 exaFLOPS (Floating-point Operations Per Second). This measurement reflects the number of FLOPS required to equal the hash output of the Bitcoin network rather than its capacity for general floating-point arithmetic operations, since the elements of the Bitcoin network (Bitcoin mining
ASIC An application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC ) is an integrated circuit (IC) chip customized for a particular use, rather than intended for general-purpose use, such as a chip designed to run in a digital voice recorder or a high-efficie ...
s) perform only the specific cryptographic hash computation required by the
Bitcoin Bitcoin (abbreviation: BTC; sign: ₿) is a decentralized digital currency that can be transferred on the peer-to-peer bitcoin network. Bitcoin transactions are verified by network nodes through cryptography and recorded in a public distr ...
protocol.


Projects and applications

Grid computing offers a way to solve Grand Challenge problems such as
protein folding Protein folding is the physical process by which a protein chain is translated to its native three-dimensional structure, typically a "folded" conformation by which the protein becomes biologically functional. Via an expeditious and reproduc ...
, financial modeling,
earthquake An earthquake (also known as a quake, tremor or temblor) is the shaking of the surface of the Earth resulting from a sudden release of energy in the Earth's lithosphere that creates seismic waves. Earthquakes can range in intensity, fr ...
simulation, and
climate Climate is the long-term weather pattern in an area, typically averaged over 30 years. More rigorously, it is the mean and variability of meteorological variables over a time spanning from months to millions of years. Some of the meteorologi ...
/
weather Weather is the state of the atmosphere, describing for example the degree to which it is hot or cold, wet or dry, calm or stormy, clear or cloudy. On Earth, most weather phenomena occur in the lowest layer of the planet's atmosphere, the ...
modeling, and was integral in enabling the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Grids offer a way of using the information technology resources optimally inside an organization. They also provide a means for offering information technology as a
utility As a topic of economics, utility is used to model worth or value. Its usage has evolved significantly over time. The term was introduced initially as a measure of pleasure or happiness as part of the theory of utilitarianism by moral philosophe ...
for commercial and noncommercial clients, with those clients paying only for what they use, as with electricity or water. As of October 2016, over 4 million machines running the open-source Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) platform are members of the
World Community Grid World Community Grid (WCG) is an effort to create the world's largest volunteer computing platform to tackle scientific research that benefits humanity. Launched on November 16, 2004, with proprietary Grid MP client from United Devices and addi ...
. One of the projects using BOINC is SETI@home, which was using more than 400,000 computers to achieve 0.828 TFLOPS as of October 2016. As of October 2016 Folding@home, which is not part of BOINC, achieved more than 101 x86-equivalent petaflops on over 110,000 machines. The
European Union The European Union (EU) is a supranational union, supranational political union, political and economic union of Member state of the European Union, member states that are located primarily in Europe, Europe. The union has a total area of ...
funded projects through the framework programmes of the
European Commission The European Commission (EC) is the executive of the European Union (EU). It operates as a cabinet government, with 27 members of the Commission (informally known as "Commissioners") headed by a President. It includes an administrative body ...
. BEinGRID (Business Experiments in Grid) was a research project funded by the European Commission as an Integrated Project under the Sixth Framework Programme (FP6) sponsorship program. Started on June 1, 2006, the project ran 42 months, until November 2009. The project was coordinated by Atos Origin. According to the project fact sheet, their mission is “to establish effective routes to foster the adoption of grid computing across the EU and to stimulate research into innovative business models using Grid technologies”. To extract best practice and common themes from the experimental implementations, two groups of consultants are analyzing a series of pilots, one technical, one business. The project is significant not only for its long duration but also for its budget, which at 24.8 million Euros, is the largest of any FP6 integrated project. Of this, 15.7 million is provided by the European Commission and the remainder by its 98 contributing partner companies. Since the end of the project, the results of BEinGRID have been taken up and carried forward by IT-Tude.com. The Enabling Grids for E-sciencE project, based in the
European Union The European Union (EU) is a supranational union, supranational political union, political and economic union of Member state of the European Union, member states that are located primarily in Europe, Europe. The union has a total area of ...
and included sites in Asia and the United States, was a follow-up project to the European DataGrid (EDG) and evolved into the
European Grid Infrastructure European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) is a series of efforts to provide access to high-throughput computing resources across Europe using grid computing techniques. The EGI links centres in different European countries to support international res ...
. This, along with the
LHC Computing Grid The Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG), formerly (until 2006) the LHC Computing Grid (LCG), is an international collaborative project that consists of a grid-based computer network infrastructure incorporating over 170 computing centers in 42 c ...
(LCG), was developed to support experiments using the
CERN The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN (; ; ), is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in a northwestern suburb of Gen ...
Large Hadron Collider The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle collider. It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 1998 and 2008 in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists and hundr ...
. A list of active sites participating within LCG can be found online as can real time monitoring of the EGEE infrastructure. The relevant software and documentation is also publicly accessible. There is speculation that dedicated fiber optic links, such as those installed by CERN to address the LCG's data-intensive needs, may one day be available to home users thereby providing internet services at speeds up to 10,000 times faster than a traditional broadband connection. The
European Grid Infrastructure European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) is a series of efforts to provide access to high-throughput computing resources across Europe using grid computing techniques. The EGI links centres in different European countries to support international res ...
has been also used for other research activities and experiments such as the simulation of oncological clinical trials. The distributed.net project was started in 1997. The
NASA Advanced Supercomputing facility The NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division is located at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field in the heart of Silicon Valley in Mountain View, California. It has been the major supercomputing and modeling and simulation resource for NA ...
(NAS) ran
genetic algorithm In computer science and operations research, a genetic algorithm (GA) is a metaheuristic inspired by the process of natural selection that belongs to the larger class of evolutionary algorithms (EA). Genetic algorithms are commonly used to ge ...
s using the
Condor cycle scavenger HTCondor is an open-source high-throughput computing software framework for coarse-grained distributed parallelization of computationally intensive tasks. It can be used to manage workload on a dedicated cluster of computers, or to farm out wor ...
running on about 350
Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, t ...
and SGI workstations. In 2001, United Devices operated the United Devices Cancer Research Project based on its Grid MP product, which cycle-scavenges on volunteer PCs connected to the Internet. The project ran on about 3.1 million machines before its close in 2007.


Definitions

Today there are many definitions of ''grid computing'': *In his article “What is the Grid? A Three Point Checklist”, Ian Foster lists these primary attributes: ** Computing resources are not administered centrally. ** Open standards are used. **Nontrivial 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 defines grid computing as “the ability, using a set of open standards and protocols, to gain access to applications and data, processing power, storage capacity and a vast array of other computing resources over the Internet. 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 their (resources) availability, capacity, performance, cost and users' quality-of-service requirements”. * An earlier example of the notion of computing as the utility was in 1965 by MIT's Fernando Corbató. Corbató and the other designers of the Multics operating system envisioned a computer facility operating “like a power company or water company”. * Buyya/Venugopal define grid as "a type of parallel and distributed system that enables the sharing, selection, and aggregation of geographically distributed autonomous resources dynamically at runtime depending on their availability, capability, performance, cost, and users' quality-of-service requirements". *
CERN The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN (; ; ), is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in a northwestern suburb of Gen ...
, one of the largest users of grid technology, talk of The Grid: “a service for sharing computer power and data storage capacity over the
Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, p ...
.”


See also

List of grid computing projects


Related concepts

* High-throughput computing *
Cloud computing Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage ( cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over mu ...
* Code mobility * Jungle computing *
Sensor grid A sensor grid integrates wireless sensor networks with grid computing concepts to enable real-time data collection and the sharing of computational and storage resources for sensor data processing and management. It is an enabling technology for bu ...
* Utility computing


Alliances and organizations

*
Open Grid Forum The Open Grid Forum (OGF) is a community of users, developers, and vendors for standardization of grid computing. It was formed in 2006 in a merger of the Global Grid Forum and the Enterprise Grid Alliance. The OGF models its process on the ...
(Formerly
Global Grid Forum The Open Grid Forum (OGF) is a community of users, developers, and vendors for standardization of grid computing. It was formed in 2006 in a merger of the Global Grid Forum and the Enterprise Grid Alliance. The OGF models its process on the In ...
) * Object Management Group * SHIWA project


Production grids

*
European Grid Infrastructure European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) is a series of efforts to provide access to high-throughput computing resources across Europe using grid computing techniques. The EGI links centres in different European countries to support international res ...
*
Enabling Grids for E-sciencE In psychotherapy and mental health, enabling has a positive sense of empowering individuals, or a negative sense of encouraging dysfunctional behavior.INFN Production Grid *
NorduGrid NorduGrid is a collaboration aiming at development, maintenance and support of the free Grid middleware, known as the Advanced Resource Connector (ARC). History The name ''NorduGrid'' first became known in 2001 as short for the project called ...
* OurGrid * Sun Grid * Techila * Xgrid * Univa Grid Engine


International projects


National projects

* GridPP (UK) * CNGrid (China) * D-Grid (Germany) *
GARUDA Garuda ( Sanskrit: ; Pāli: ; Vedic Sanskrit: गरुळ Garuḷa) is a Hindu demigod and divine creature mentioned in the Hindu, Buddhist and Jain faiths. He is primarily depicted as the mount (''vahana'') of the Hindu god Vishnu. Garu ...
(India) * VECC (
Calcutta Kolkata (, or , ; also known as Calcutta , the official name until 2001) is the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal, on the eastern bank of the Hooghly River west of the border with Bangladesh. It is the primary business, commer ...
, India) * IsraGrid (Israel) * INFN Grid (Italy) * PL-Grid (Poland) * National Grid Service (UK) *
Open Science Grid The Open Science Grid Consortium is an organization that administers a worldwide grid of technological resources called the Open Science Grid, which facilitates distributed computing for scientific research. Founded in 2004, the consortium is co ...
(USA) * TeraGrid (USA)


Standards and APIs

* Distributed Resource Management Application API (DRMAA) * A technology-agnostic information model for a uniform representation of Grid resources (GLUE) * Grid Remote Procedure Call (GridRPC) * Grid Security Infrastructure (GSI) * Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) * Common Object Request Broker Architecture (COBRA) * Open Grid Services Infrastructure (OGSI) * A Simple API for Grid Applications (SAGA) * Web Services Resource Framework (WSRF)


Monitoring frameworks

* GStat


References


Bibliography

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Global Grids and Software Toolkits: A Study of Four Grid Middleware TechnologiesThe Grid Technology Cookbook
* Francesco Lelli, Eric Frizziero, Michele Gulmini, Gaetano Maron, Salvatore Orlando, Andrea Petrucci and Silvano Squizzato. ''The many faces of the integration of instruments and the grid''. International Journal of Web and Grid Services 2007 – Vol. 3, No.3 pp. 239 – 26
Electronic Edition
* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Grid Computing