19-04-2012, 11:55 AM
GRID COMPUTING
Grid computing.doc (Size: 218 KB / Downloads: 72)
INTRODUCTION
Grid Computing is a method of harnessing the power of many computers in a network to solve
problems requiring a large number of processing cycles and involving huge amounts of data.
Virtual resources and Virtual Organizations for Collaborations
Another important grid computing contribution is to enable and simplify collaboration among a wider audience. In the past, distributed computing promised this collaboration and achieved it to some extent. Grid computing takes these capabilities to an even wider audience, while offering important standards that enable very heterogeneous systems to work together to form the image of a large virtual computing system offering a variety of virtual resources. The users of the grid can be organized dynamically into a number of virtual organizations, each with different policy requirements. These virtual organizations can share their resources collectively as a larger grid.
Sharing starts with data in the form of files or databases. A “data grid” can expand data capabilities in several ways. First, files or databases can seamlessly span many systems and thus have larger capacities than on any single system. Such spanning can improve data transfer rates through the use of striping techniques. Data can be duplicated throughout the grid to serve as a backup and can be hosted on or near the machines most likely to need the data, in conjunction with advanced scheduling techniques.
Sharing is not limited to files, but also includes many other resources, such as equipment, software, services, licenses, and others. These
resources are “virtualized” to give them a more uniform interoperability among heterogeneous grid participants.
Reliability
High-end conventional computing systems use expensive hardware to increase reliability. They are built using chips with redundant circuits that vote on results, and contain much logic to achieve graceful recovery from an assortment of hardware failures.
Security in Grid Computing
a. The Grid Security Problem
We introduce of grid security problem with and example illustrated in figure1. We imagine a scientist, a member of a multi-institutional scientific collaboration, who receives e-mail from a colleague regarding a new data set. He starts an analysis program, which dispatches code to the remote location where the data is stored (site C). Once started, the analysis program determines that it needs to run a simulation in order to compare the experimental results with predictions.
Conclusion
Traditional computing environments don’t provide flexibility for sharing resources to form “virtual organizations”. Grid computing provides a promising and efficient way of using computing and storage resources. It serves as “Computing on Demand” model similar to the way electrical power
is used. Ideal for collaborative environments because it provides dynamic resource sharing among different geographic locations and also it hides the complexity from the user who will see the grid as a huge computing and storage device.