The GRID Computing

The grid computing infrastructure is made up of several key components. The “fabric” consists of the hardware elements – processor “farms” comprising hundreds to thousands of compute nodes, disk and tape storage, and networking. The grid computing infrastructure would run on top of a cloud computing infrastructure. Grid computing is a way to share computing resources within and among organizations. The concept first emerged in the mid-1990s as academic researchers began exploring the rudiments of grid infrastructures.

The grid computing effort is fundamentally open source, and centered around the open source Globus Toolkit developed by the Globus Project, driven primarily by academic users. As a close relative to clustering, Globus plus other standards-based software such as X.509 (messaging) and LDAP (directories), as well as clustering technologies such as schedulers, load balancers, and resource allocators, can be inserted on Linux and various Unix flavors. Grid computing is an emerging technology that enables large-scale resource sharing and coordinated problem solving within distributed, often loosely coordinated groups-what are sometimes termed “virtual organizations. By providing scalable, secure, high-performance mechanisms for discovering and negotiating access to remote resources, Grid technologies promise to make it possible for scientific collaborations to share resources on an unprecedented scale, and for geographically distributed groups to work together in ways that were previously impossible.

Grid computing is a paradigm in shift. New architectures and standards are changing the shape and direction of the Grid’s development. Grid computing is defined by Wikipedia as: ”a form of distributed computing whereby a ‘’super and virtual computer” is composed of a cluster of networked, loosely-coupled computers, acting in concert to perform very large tasks. This technology has been applied to computationally-intensive scientific, mathematical, and academic problems through volunteer computing. Grid computing is mostly used in computational science while workflow management is used for business applications: we try to bridge the gap between these two areas in order to make further progress in both of them.

The GRID computing software package uses the CPUs of computers within the GRID to process information only when the computers are turned on and not being used. A GRID network consists of a “head node” (computer) with the GRID software manager installed and several client computers that have a the GRID client installed. The Grid Computing Toolbox includes a Personal Grid Server, letting you simulate a grid with any number of nodes on your desktop machine. You can develop and test your parallel applications before running them on the real grid. Grid Computing is about the “Business on Demand” revolution: delivering the exact technology resources you need, anywhere, anytime, without complexity or high cost. You can do it all, starting right now, starting with your existing systems. Grid computing is currently utilized in academic endeavors such as the development of new algorithms, mapping the human genome, and atomic and molecular visualization applications.