Abstract
Advances in Grid computing are stimulating the emergence of novel types of Grids. Accessible Grids, manageable Grids, interactive Grids and personal Grids represent a significant evolution of Grid computing. More and more researchers are realising the potentials of emerging Grids in bridging the current gap between Grid technologies and end users. Nevertheless, no reviews or classifications on emerging Grids are available. Therefore, this chapter aims to give a review on Grid systems. It sets out to develop a comprehensive classification of both traditional and emerging Grid systems with an aim to motivate further research and to assist in establishing a solid foundation in such a rapidly developing and expanding field.
Top2. Background
2.1. Grid Computing
Basically, grid computing (Foster & Kesselman, 2003) is a relatively new distributed system paradigm where computational resources are coupled together to form a large-scale distributed system where all resources are available for sharing. This has the great advantage of providing a resource-rich infrastructure capable of solving data intensive and complex computational problems such as protein folding and weather forecasting in an acceptable time and at a reasonable cost.
Indeed, there are as many definitions to the grid as the growing number of organizations utilizing it. A common theme underlying these definitions is the coordinated resource sharing and problem solving in a virtual organisation (VO). A VO is a dynamic set of participants defined around a set of resource sharing rules and conditions as shown in Figure 1. Some grid definitions add additional criteria requiring the grid resources to be distributed across multiple administrative domains (Foster, 2001) (Joseph & Fellenstein, 2003) or to be geographically distributed (Buyya, 2005). These additional criteria exclude clusters, where shared resources are usually in the same locality and administrative domain, from the grid definition. However, some leading grid authorities, such as Sun Microsystems (Sun Microsystems, 2009), do consider clusters as grid environments, they use the term ‘Cluster Grids’ to refer to them (Sun Cluster Grid, 2002).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Personal Grid: A grid system with a very limited virtual organization (VO) scope. It is usually owned, constructed, managed and utilized by an individual and other people whom s\he trusts.
Utility Computing: Is a service provisioning model where computing resources are offered as utility services in terms of availability, ease of access, on demand usage, and billing scheme.
User-Centricity: A design philosophy in which the needs and expectations of the end user of an interface are the centre of focus.
Manageability: The ability of a system to be controlled easily either by means of self-control or by providing certain techniques to ease external controls.
Knowledge Grid: Is a grid system in which data, resources and services are given well-defined meanings that are understandable at both machine and human levels using knowledge technologies such as semantic and ontology.
Everything as a Service (EaaS\ XaaS\ aaS) computing: Is a service deployment and provisioning model that can be viewed as a class of or a more recent term for utility computing. The common thread amongst all XaaS services is the outsourcing and on-demand nature of their offerings.
Accessible Grid: A grid that consists of a group of mobile or fixed devices with wired or wireless connectivity and predefined or ad-hoc infrastructures making it accessible from more geographical locations and social settings than traditional grids.
Interactivity: The ability of a system to timely respond to real-time events requiring rapid response times and synchronous communication.
Accessibility: Making system resources available to a wider user community regardless of their geographical locations or the physical capabilities of their access devices.
Cloud Computing: Is an Internet-based computing style. It is a general concept that incorporates many other recent technology models, such as utility computing, XaaS and Web services, to satisfy the computing demands of the users.
User-Centric Grids: Grid systems with highly customizable Web portals providing user-friendly access points to grid resources for people from different domains.
Organizational Grids: Traditional grid systems which are designed with professional expert users from research and enterprise domains in mind. They have highly sophisticated Web portals.
Grid Computing: Is a distributed system infrastructure (hardware and software) for enabling remote resource sharing and utilization to provide massive computing capabilities as a set of services.
Manageable Grid: A sophisticated grid that automatically manages, adapts, monitors, diagnoses and fixes itself or provides certain techniques to ease external controls.
Autonomic Grid: Is a grid that is able to configure, re-configure, protect and heal itself under varying and unpredictable conditions.