GRID COMPUTING

The popularity of the Internet as well as the availability of powerful computers and high-speed network technologies as low-cost commodity components is changing the way we use computers today. These technology opportunities have led to the possibility of using distributed computers as a single, unified computing resource, leading to what is popularly known as Grid computing. The term Grid is chosen as an analogy to a power Grid that provides consistent, pervasive, dependable, transparent access to electricity irrespective of its source. A detailed analysis of this analogy can be found in. This new approach to network computing is known by several names, such as metacomputing, scalable computing, global computing, Internet computing, and more recently peer-to- peer (P2P) computing.

Grids enable the sharing, selection, and aggregation of a wide variety of resources including supercomputers, storage systems, data sources, and specialized devices (see Figure 1)that are geographically distributed and owned by different organizations for solving large-scale computational and data intensive problems in science, engineering, and commerce. Thus creating virtual organizations and enterprises as a temporary alliance of enterprises or organizations that come together to share resources and skills, core competencies, or resources in order to better respond to business opportunities or large-scale application processing requirements, and whose cooperation is supported by computer networks.

 The concept of Grid computing started as a project to link geographically dispersed supercomputers, but now it has grown far beyond its original intent. The Grid infrastructure can benefit many applications, including collaborative engineering, data exploration, high-throughput computing, and distributed supercomputing.

A Grid can be viewed as a seamless, integrated computational and collaborative environment (see Figure 1). The users interact with the Grid resource broker to solve problems, which in turn performs resource discovery, scheduling, and the processing of application jobs on the distributed Grid resources. From the end-user point of view, Grids can be used to provide the following types of services.

•Computational services. These are concerned with providing secure services for executing application jobs on distributed computational resources individually or collectively. Resources brokers provide the services for collective use of distributed resources. A Grid providing computational services is often called a computational Grid. Some examples of computational Grids are: NASA IPG, the World Wide Grid, and the NSF TeraGrid .

•Data services. These are concerned with proving secure access to distributed datasets and their management. To provide a scalable storage and access to the data sets, they may be replicated, catalogued, and even different datasets stored in different locations to create an illusion of mass storage. The processing of datasets is carried out using computational Grid services and such a combination is commonly called data Grids. Sample applications that need such services for management, sharing, and processing of large datasets are high-energy physics and accessing distributed chemical databases for drug design.

•Application services. These are concerned with application management and providing access to remote software and libraries transparently. The emerging technologies such as Web services are expected to play a leading role in defining application services. They build on computational and data services provided by the Grid. An example system that can be used to develop such services is NetSolve.

•Information services. These are concerned with the extraction and presentation of data with meaning by using the services of computational, data, and/or application services. The low-level details handled by this are the way that information is represented, stored, accessed, shared, and maintained. Given its key role in many scientific endeavors, the Web is the obvious point of departure for this level.

•Knowledge services. These are concerned with the way that knowledge is acquired, used, retrieved, published, and maintained to assist users in achieving their particular goals and objectives. Knowledge is understood as information applied to achieve a goal, solve a problem, or execute a decision. An example of this is data mining for automatically building a new knowledge.

To build a Grid, the development and deployment of a number of services is required. These include security, information, directory, resource allocation, and payment mechanisms in an open environment and high-level services for application development, execution management, resource aggregation, and scheduling.

Grid applications (typically multidisciplinary and large-scale processing applications) often couple resources that cannot be replicated at a single site, or which may be globally located for other practical reasons. These are some of the driving forces behind the foundation of global Grids. In this light, the Grid allows users to solve larger or new problems by pooling together resources that could not be easily coupled before. Hence, the Grid is not only a computing infrastructure, for large applications, it is a technology that can bond and unify remote and diverse distributed resources ranging from meteorological sensors to data vaults and from parallel supercomputers to personal digital organizers. As such, it will provide pervasive services to all users that need them.

This paper aims to present the state-of-the-art of Grid computing and attempts to survey the major international efforts in this area.

Benefits of Grid Computing

Grid computing can provide many benefits not available with traditional computing models:

• Better utilization of resources — Grid computing uses distributed resources more efficiently and delivers more usable computing power. This can decrease time-to-market, allow for innovation, or enable additional testing and simulation for improved product quality. By employing existing resources, grid computing helps protect IT investments, containing costs while providing more capacity.

• Increased user productivity — By proproviding transparent access to resources, work can be completed more quickly. Users gain additional productivity as they can focus on design and development rather than wasting valuable time hunting for resources and manually scheduling and managing large numbers of jobs.

• Scalability — Grids can grow seamlessly over time, allowing many thousands of processors to be integrated into one cluster. Components can be updated independently and additional resources can be added as needed, reducing large one-time expenses.

• Flexibility — Grid computing provides computing power where it is needed most, helping to better meet dynamically changing work loads. Grids can contain heterogeneous compute nodes, allowing resources to be added and removed as needs dictate.

Levels of Deployment

Grid computing can be divided into three logical levels of deployment: Cluster Grids, Enterprise Grids, and Global Grids.

• Cluster Grids

The simplest form of a grid, a Cluster Grid consists of multiple systems interconnected through a network. Cluster Grids may contain distributed workstations and servers, as well as centralized resources in a datacenter environment. Typically owned and used by a single project or department, Cluster Grids support both high throughput and high performance jobs. Common examples of the Cluster Grid architecture include compute farms, groups of multi-processor HPC systems, Beowulf clusters, and networks of

workstations (NOW).

• Enterprise Grids

As capacity needs increase, multiple Cluster Grids can be combined into an Enterprise Grid. Enterprise Grids enable multiple projects or departments to share computing resources in a cooperative way. Enterprise Grids typically contain resources from multiple administrative domains, but are located in the same geographic location.

• Global Grids

Global Grids are a collection of Enterprise Grids, all of which have agreed upon global usage policies and protocols, but not necessarily the same implementation. Computing resources may be geographically dispersed, connecting sites around the globe. Designed to support and address the needs of multiple sites and organizations sharing resources, Global Grids provide the power of distributed resources to users anywhere in the world.

GRID CONSTRUCTION: GENERAL PRINCIPLES

This section briefly highlights some of the general principles that underlie the construction of the Grid. In particular, the idealized design features that are required by a Grid to provide users with a seamless computing environment are discussed. Four main aspects characterize a Grid.

•Multiple administrative domains and autonomy. Grid resources are geographically distributed across multiple administrative domains and owned by different organizations. The autonomy of resource owners needs to be honored along with their local resource management and usage policies.

•Heterogeneity. A Grid involves a multiplicity of resources that are heterogeneous in nature and will encompass a vast range of technologies.

•Scalability. A Grid might grow from a few integrated resources to millions. This raises the problem of potential performance degradation as the size of Grids increases. Consequently, applications that require a large number of geographically located resources must be designed to be latency and bandwidth tolerant.

•Dynamicity or adaptability. In a Grid, resource failure is the rule rather than the exception. In fact, with so many resources in a Grid, the probability of some resource failing is high. Resource managers or applications must tailor their behavior dynamically and use the available resources and services efficiently and effectively.

Design Features

The following are the main design features required by a Grid environment.

•Administrative hierarchy. An administrative hierarchy is the way that each Grid environment divides itself up to cope with a potentially global extent. The administrative hierarchy determines how administrative information flows through the Grid.

•Communication services. The communication needs of applications using a Grid environment are diverse, ranging from reliable point-to-point to unreliable multicast communications. The communications infrastructure needs to support protocols that are used for bulk-data transport, streaming data, group communications, and those used by distributed objects. The network services used also provide the Grid with important QoS parameters such as latency, bandwidth, reliability, fault-tolerance, and jitter control.

•Information services. A Grid is a dynamic environment where the location and types of services available are constantly changing. A major goal is to make all resources accessible to any process in the system, without regard to the relative location of the resource user. It is necessary to provide mechanisms to enable a rich environment in which information is readily obtained by requesting services. The Grid information (registration and directory) services components provide the mechanisms for registering and obtaining information about the Grid structure, resources, services, and status.

•Naming services. In a Grid, like in any distributed system, names are used to refer to a wide variety of objects such as computers, services, or data objects. The naming service provides a uniform name space across the complete Grid environment. Typical naming services are provided by the international X.500 naming scheme or DNS, the Internet’s scheme.

•Distributed file systems and caching. Distributed applications, more often than not, require access to files distributed among many servers. A distributed file system is therefore a key component in a distributed system. From an applications point of view it is important that a distributed file system can provide a uniform global namespace, support a range of file I/O protocols, require little or no program modification, and provide means that enable performance optimizations to be implemented, such as the usage of caches.

•Security and authorization. Any distributed system involves all four aspects of security: confidentiality, integrity, authentication, and accountability. Security within a Grid environment is a complex issue requiring diverse resources autonomously administered to interact in a manner that does not impact the usability of the resources or introduces security holes/lapses in individual systems or the environments as a whole. A security infrastructure is the key to the success or failure of a Grid environment.

•System status and fault tolerance. To provide a reliable and robust environment it is important that a means of monitoring resources and applications is provided. To accomplish this task, tools that monitor resources and application need to be deployed.

•Resource management and scheduling. The management of processor time, memory, network, storage, and other components in a Grid is clearly very important. The overall aims to efficiently and effectively schedule the applications that need to utilize the available resources in the Grid computing environment. From a user’s point of view, resource management and scheduling should be transparent; their interaction with it being confined to a manipulating mechanism for submitting their application. It is important in a Grid that a resource management and scheduling service can interact with those that may be installed locally.

•Computational economy and resource trading. As a Grid is constructed by coupling resources distributed across various organizations and administrative domains that may be owned by different organizations, it is essential to support mechanisms and policies that help in regulate resource supply and demand. An economic approach is one means of managing resources in a complex and decentralized manner. This approach provides incentives for resource owners, and users to be part of the Grid and develop and using strategies that help maximize their objectives.

•Programming tools and paradigms. Grid applications (multi-disciplinary applications) couple resources that cannot be replicated at a single site even or may be globally located for other practical reasons. A Grid should include interfaces, APIs, utilities, and tools to provide a rich development environment. Common scientific languages such as C, C++, and Fortran should be available, as should application-level interfaces such as MPI and PVM. A variety of programming paradigms should be supported, such as message passing or distributed shared memory. In addition, a suite of numerical and other commonly used libraries should be available.

•User and administrative GUI. The interfaces to the services and resources available should be intuitive and easy to use. In addition, they should work on a range of different platforms and operating systems. They also need to take advantage of Web technologies to offer a view of portal supercomputing. The Web-centric approach to access supercomputing resources should enable users to access any resource from anywhere over any platform at any time. That means, the users should be allowed to submit their jobs to computational resources through a Web interface from any of the accessible platforms such as PCs, laptops, or Personal Digital Assistant, thus supporting the ubiquitous access to the Grid. The provision of access to scientific applications through the Web (e.g. RWCPs parallel protein information analysis system) leads to the creation of science portals.

GRID ARCHITECTURE

Our goal in describing our Grid architecture is not to provide a complete enumeration of all required protocols (and services, APIs, and SDKs) but rather to identify requirements for general classes of component. The result is an extensible, open architectural structure within which can be placed solutions to key VO requirements. Our architecture and the subsequent discussion organize components into layers, as shown in Figure. Components within each layer share common characteristics but can build on capabilities and behaviors provided by any lower layer.

 In specifying the various layers of the Grid architecture, we follow the principles of the “hourglass model”. The narrow neck of the hourglass defines a small set of core abstractions and protocols (e.g., TCP and HTTP in the Internet), onto which many different high-level behaviors can be mapped (the top of the hourglass), and which themselves can be mapped onto many different underlying technologies (the base of the hourglass). By definition, the number of protocols defined at the neck must be small. In our architecture, the neck of the hourglass consists of Resource and Connectivity protocols, which facilitate the sharing of individual resources. Protocols at these layers are designed so that they can be implemented on top of a diverse range of resource types, defined at the Fabric layer, and can in turn be used to construct a wide range of global services and application-specific behaviors at the Collective layer—so called because they involve the coordinated (“collective”) use of multiple resources.