About the Grid

by admin — last modified 2008-11-07 12:44

The definition

There are hundreds of Grid definitions. One of them is as follows: the Grid is a service for sharing computer power, data storage capacity and other resources over the Internet in a secure and reliable way.

The history

The concept of the Grid was set forth by Ian Foster, Carl Kesselman and Steve Tuecke, the so-called "fathers of the Grid". Together they led the effort to create a basic set of Grid tools, the so-called Globus Toolkit, incorporating not just CPU management but also storage management, security provisioning, data migration, monitoring and a set of tools for developing additional services based on the same infrastructure, including agreement negotiation, notification mechanisms, trigger services and information aggregation. In short, the term Grid has much further-reaching implications than the general public believes. While Globus Toolkit remains the de-facto standard for building Grid solutions, a number of other tools have also been created that answer selected subsets of requirements for the creation of an enterprise Grid.

Grid computing

Grid computing is computational model that provides the ability to perform high-throughput computing by taking advantage of many networked computers to model a virtual computer architecture that is able to distribute process execution across a parallel infrastructure. Grids use the resources of many separate computers connected by a network (usually the Internet) to solve large-scale computation problems. Grids provide the ability to perform computations on large data sets by:

breaking them down into many smaller ones, or
performing more computations at once than would be possible on a single computer, by modelling a parallel division of work between processes.

Resource allocation in the Grid is performed in accordance with Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that are concluded between Grid projects or centres and Internet Service Providers to guarantee needed connection quality.

Security

As Grid computing involves sharing heterogeneous resources, based on different platforms, hardware/software architectures and computer languages, located in different places belonging to different administrative domains over a network using open standards, the use of secure authorization techniques is necessary to allow remote users to control computing resources.

In security engineering and computer security, authorization is a part of the operating system that protects computer resources by only allowing those resources to be used by resource consumers that have been granted authority to use them. Resources include individual files or data items, computer programs, computer devices and functionality provided by computer applications. Examples of consumers are computer users, computer programs and other devices on the computer.

Most modern multi-user operating systems include an authorization process which in turn makes use of an authentication process to identify consumers. When a consumer tries to use a resource, the authorization process checks that the consumer has been granted permission to use that resource. Permissions are generally defined by the computer system's administrator in some types of "security policy application", such as an access control list or a capability, on the basis of the "principle of least privilege": consumers should only be granted permissions they need to do their job.

Architecture

From the technical point of view the most typical architecture of the Grid includes the following systems:

Workload Management System (WMS) - provides user with a possibility to submit and manage jobs on Grid.
Data Management System (DMS) - takes care of the user data (like job inputs, results, support data etc.) by providing storage elements and logical file catalogues.
Monitoring System (MS) - provides the user with a possibility to check on her or his jobs, get their statuses and accounting information.
Information System (IS) - contains the information about resources currently available on the Grid.
Authentication and Authorization System (AAS) - takes care of security aspect of the Grid system.

Motivation behind the Grids

Grids enable us to perform research in such disciplines as High Energy Physics, earthquake simulation, climate/weather/air pollution modelling, protein folding, quantum chemistry, financial modelling and many others. Grids also offer a way of using IT resources optimally inside an organization.

Among other goals there is better exploitation of available computing power and sharing of resources among different people grouped into so called Virtual Organizations.

A Virtual Organization is an organization existing as a corporate, non-profit, educational, or otherwise productive entity that does not have a central geographical location and comprises a set of independent organizations, sharing resources and skills to achieve its goals. Interaction among members of the Virtual Organization is mainly done through computer networks.

In Grid computing, the concept of a Virtual Organization has been formulated to describe all those distributed institutions and individuals belonging to the same community and working at the same scientific problems willing to share their resources in order to achieve common goals. Members of a VO access shared resources in an easy, transparent, coordinated and secure way. The resource owners decide if they want to allow VO to use their resource which makes VO a basic unit of trust. So in order to get access to the resources the user must first join some VO (like BalticGrid VO).

Some markets and applications of the Grids include:

BalticGrid joins European Grid

Grids are constantly spreading to new countries, spanning numerous sites around the world. In Europe many organizations are currently involved in the development of Grid technologies, participating in numerous Grid projects supported by the European Commission. One of those projects, funded by EU in the framework of the 6FP, is BalticGrid. Its mission is to extend the European Grid by integrating new partners from the Baltic States (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia) in the European Grid research community and to foster the development of Grid infrastructure in these countries. To this end, the BalticGrid consortium has enlisted the help of experienced EU Grid computing centers whose aim is to guide our new partners through the process of deploying Grid resources and applications at their respective institutions.

Further steps

If you are interested in Grid computing and would like to either utilize the resources of the BalticGrid or add your own system (cluster or storage) to the BalticGrid please read the 'Join the BalticGrid' part of the 'Using Grid' section.

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