What is The Grid

The Grid is an emerging solution for sharing resources through a network. It is meant to manage heterogeneous resources in world-scale multi-institutional networks. Grid resources monitoring and network monitoring are very active research areas with actually efficient solutions. Unfortunately, these solutions are limited in terms of analysis of the gathered data. Our proposition is to use data warehouse (DW) and online analytical processing (OLAP) technologies on Grid monitoring information. This allows new complex analyses of crucial importance for Grid users’ everyday tasks. Unfortunately, the implementation raises several challenging issues. This article is organized as follows. First, we introduce concepts of DW, OLAP, and Grids, and we discuss recent advances in Grid monitoring as well as the needs and usage of the Grid users. Then we present our conceptual and implementation solutions. Finally, we discuss our main contribution and point out the future works.