GRID COMPUTING – INTRODUCTION AND ARCHITECTURE

GRID COMPUTING – INTRODUCTION AND ARCHITECTURE

Abstract:

The last decade has seen a substantial increase in commodity computer and network performance, mainly as a result of faster hardware and more sophisticated software. Nevertheless, there are still problems, in the fields of science, engineering, and business, which cannot be effectively dealt with using the current generation of supercomputers. In fact, due to their size and complexity, these problems are often very numerically and/or data intensive and consequently require a variety of heterogeneous resources that are not available on a single machine. A number of teams have conducted experimental studies on the cooperative use of geographically distributed resources unified to act as a single powerful computer. This new approach is known as Grid computing.

The basic idea of grid computing is to use the computational power of idle PCs and harness those wasted cycles to form a virtual supercomputer. Many applications can benefit from the Grid infrastructure, including collaborative engineering, data exploration, high-throughput computing, and distributed supercomputing. On the contrary, the advancement in grid computing's underlying technology could make it possible for businesses to use their networks to undertake complex computing tasks such as designing machinery and performing what-if scenarios based on vast financial databases. A number of corporations, professional groups, university consortiums, and other groups have developed or are developing frameworks and software for managing grid computing projects.

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