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Journal of Scientific and Engineering Research, 2015, 2(3):9-12

ISSN: 2394-2630
Review Article CODEN(USA): JSERBR

Grid Developments and Deployment

Jitendra Kumawat

Department of Computer Science, Amity University, Rajasthan

Abstract Grid computing is a term referring to the combination of computer resources from multiple
administrative domains to reach a common goal. The grid can be thought of as a distributed system with non-
interactive workloads that involve a large number of files. What distinguishes grid computing from conventional
high performance computing systems such as cluster computing is that grids tend to be more loosely coupled,
heterogeneous, and geographically dispersed. Although a grid can be dedicated to a specialized application, it is
more common that a single grid will be used for a variety of different purposes. Grids are often constructed with
the aid of general-purpose grid software libraries known as middleware.
Grid size can vary by a considerable amount. Grids are a form of distributed computing whereby a “super virtual
computer” is composed of many networked loosely coupled computers acting together to perform very large
tasks. Furthermore, “distributed” or “grid” computing, in general, is a special type of parallel computing that
relies on complete computers (with onboard CPUs, storage, power supplies, network interfaces, etc.) connected
to a network (private, public or the Internet) by a conventional network interface, such as Ethernet. This is in
contrast to the traditional notion of a supercomputer, which has many processors connected by a local high-
speed computer bus.
Keywords Sulphurhexafluoride (SF6 gas), particle movement.

Introduction
The growth of the Internet, along with the availability of powerful computers and high-speed networks as low-
cost commodity components, is changing the way scientists and engineers do computing, and are also changing
how society in general manages information and information services. These new technologies have enabled the
clustering of a wide variety of geographically distributed resources, such as supercomputers, storage systems,
data sources, instruments, and special devices and services, which can then be used as unified resources.
Furthermore, they have enabled seamless access to and interaction among these distributed resources, services
applications and data. The new paradigm that has evolved is popularly termed as “Grid” computing. Grid
Computing and the utilization of the global Grid infrastructure have presented significant challenges at all levels
including conceptual and implementation models, application formulation and development, programming
systems, infrastructures and services, resource management, networking and security, and led to the
development of a global research community.
Increased network bandwidth, more powerful computers, and the acceptance of the Internet have driven the on-
going demand for new and better ways to compute. Commercial enterprises, academic institutions, and research
organizations continue to take advantage of these advancements, and constantly seek new technologies and
practices that enable them to seek new ways to conduct business. However, many challenges remain. Increasing
pressure on development and research costs, faster time-to-market, greater throughput, and improved quality
and innovation are always foremost in the minds of administrators - while computational needs are outpacing
the ability of organizations to deploy sufficient resources to meet growing workload demands.

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On top of these challenges is the need to handle dynamically changing workloads. The truth is, flexibility is key.
In a world with rapidly changing markets, both research institutions and enterprises need to quickly provide
compute power where it is needed most. Indeed, if systems could be dynamically created when they are needed,
teams could harness these resources to increase innovation and better achieve their objectives.

Grid Computing– An Overview

Grid Computing delivers on the potential in the growth and abundance of network connected systems and
bandwidth: computation, collaboration and communication over the Advanced Web. At the heart of Grid
Computing is a computing infrastructure that provides dependable, consistent, pervasive and inexpensive access
to computational capabilities. By pooling federated assets into a virtual system, a grid provides a single point of
access to powerful distributed resources.
Researchers working to solve many of the most difficult scientific problems have long understood the potential
of such shared distributed computing systems. Development teams focused on technical products, like
semiconductors, are using Grid Computing to achieve higher throughput. Likewise, the business community is
beginning to recognize the importance of distributed systems in applications such as data mining and economic
modeling.
With a grid, networked resources -- desktops, servers, storage, databases, and even scientific instruments -- can
be combined to deploy massive computing power wherever and whenever it is needed most. Users can find
resources quickly, use them efficiently, and scale them seamlessly.
Grid computing combines computers from multiple administrative domains to reach a common goal, to solve a
single task, and may then disappear just as quickly.
One of the main strategies of grid computing is to use middleware to divide and apportion pieces of a program
among several computers, sometimes up to many thousands. Grid computing involves computation in a
distributed fashion, which may also involve the aggregation of large-scale cluster computing-based systems.
The size of a grid may vary from small—confined to a network of computer workstations within a corporation,
for example to large, public collaborations across many companies and networks. "The notion of a confined grid
may also be known as an intra-nodes cooperation whilst the notion of a larger, wider grid may thus refer to
inter-nodes cooperation".
Grids are a form of distributed computing whereby a “super virtual computer” is composed of many networked
loosely coupled computers acting together to perform very large tasks. This technology has been applied to
computationally intensive scientific, mathematical, and academic problems through volunteer computing, and it
is used in commercial enterprises for such diverse applications as drug discovery, economic forecasting, seismic
analysis, and back office data processing in support for e-commerce and Web services.

The Grid Concept

The term „grid‟ is variously used to describe a number of different, but related, ideas, including utility
computing concepts, grid technologies, and grid standards. In this paper the term „Grid‟ is used in the widest
sense to describe the ability to pool and share Information Technology (IT) resources in a global environment in
a manner which achieves seamless, secure, transparent, simple access to a vast collection of many different
types of hardware and software resources, (including compute nodes, software codes, data repositories, storage
devices, graphics and terminal devices and instrumentation and equipment), through non-dedicated wide area
networks, to deliver customized resources to specific applications.
At the most general level Grid is independent of any specific standard or technology. Any practical grid is
realized through specific distributed computing technologies and standards that can support the necessary
interoperability.
Today, there are no universally agreed grid standards, but there are freely available, open source and proprietary
grid technologies that implement emerging standards recommendations. Separate web services standards are
also emerging which have many grid-like capabilities. Indeed grids are already being built by integrating and
enhancing web standards technology.
While the concept of a “computing utility” providing “continuous operation analogous to power and telephone”
can be traced back to the 1960s and the Multics Project [1], the origins of the current Grid revolution can be

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traced to the 1980‟s and early 1990‟s and the tremendous amounts of research being done on parallel
programming and distributed systems. Parallel computers is a variety of architectures had become commercially
available, and networking hardware and software were becoming more widely deployed. To effectively program
thee new parallel machines, a long list of parallel programming languages and tools were being developed
evaluated [2]. This list included Linda, Concurrent Prolog, BSP, Occam, Programming Composition Notion,
Fortan-D, and Compositional C++, pC++, Mentat, Nexus, Lightweight threads, and the Parallel Virtual
Machine, to name just a few.
“The Metacomputer is similar to an electricity grid.
When you turn on your light, you don‟t care where the
power comes from; you just want the light to come on.
The same is true for computer users. They want their
job to run on the best possible machine and they really
Don‟t care how that gets done.”
The trials and tribulations of such as arduous demonstration paid-off since it crystallized for a much broader
segment of the scientific community, what was possible and what needed to be done [3]. In early 1996, the
Globus Project officially got under way after being proposed to ARPA in November 1994. The process and
communication middleware system called Nexus [4] was originally built by Argonne National Laboratory to
essentially to be a compiler target and provide remote service requests across heterogeneous machines for
application codes written in a higher-level language. The goal of the Globus Project was to build a global Nexus
that would provide support for resource discovery, resource composition, data access, and authentication etc.
The first Globus applications were demonstrated at Supercomputing.

“(Our vision) is the integration of many computational,

Visualization and information resources into a coherent
infrastructure… We refer to the integrated resources
As the „Power Grid‟ or simply the Grid”.
Making Grids A Reality
While Grids have come a very long want from the efforts of several labs trying to address thomy, fundamental
issues in distributed computing by building research prototypes, Grids still have a very long way to go before
they are a practical, widely deployed reality. At the current time, several basic Grid tools are stabilizing and
many Grid projects, including some very well funded international projects, are deploying sizeable Grids.
However, one can argue that Grids will not be a practical reality until (1) there is a core set of Grid services,
with (2) sufficient reliability, that are (3) widely deployed enough to be usable. This is the current challenge for
making Grids a reality. This issue is how to make this happen.
(A) Expanding the Scale and Scope of Deployment
A number of very large Grid projects are currently underway. Examples include the EU DataGrid project, the
NSF TeraGrid project, and the Japanese NaReGi project. Many other smaller projects are currently underway,
too, involving just a few institutions in a specific application domain. There are also a number of Grid-like
Commercial products for cycle harvesting, distributed scheduling, etc. Hence, tools must be simpler for reliable
deployment and use by non-specialists.
(B) Standards- The Web/Grid Convergence
A key to defining exactly what the core Grid services are and facilitating their easy deployment on all scales in
standards. To this end, the Global Grid Forum defined the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) extending
the Web Services (to Support transient and stateful behaviors) and combined them with Grid protocols to define
the Open Grid Service Infrastructure (OGSI), providing a uniform architecture for building and managing Grids
and Grid applications.
(C) Non-Technical Barriers to Acceptance
Besides the technical issues concerning Grid adoption mentioned above, there are clearly many non-technical or
cultural barriers as well. Grid computing in many ways, is about resource sharing while the “corporate culture”

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of many organization may be fundamentally oppose to this. Some Organizational units may jealously guard
their machines or data out of a perceived economic or security threat.

Grid Developments and Deployment

A key issue facing the industry is the timing and mode of deployment of Grid technology to ensure that it is
sufficiently mature to deliver the expected business benefits. There is emerging evidence that the technology can
achieve significant operational benefits (e.g. in telemedicine), improvements in performance (e.g. in climate
modeling and genomics) and a significant reduction in costs. Nevertheless, current grid technologies are not yet
viewed as sufficiently mature for industry scale use, and remain largely unproven in terms of security,
reliability, scalability, and performance.

Short Term
For the short term (within the next two years), Grid is most likely to be introduced into large organizations as
internal „Enterprise grids‟, i.e. built behind firewalls and used within a limited trust domain, perhaps with
controlled links to external grids. A good analogy would be the adoption into business of the Internet, where the
first step was often the roll out of a secure internal company „Intranet‟, with a gradual extension of capabilities
(and hence opportunity for misuse) towards fully ubiquitous Internet access. Centralized management is
expected to be the only way to guarantee qualities of service. Typically users of this early technology will be
expecting to achieve IT cost reduction, increased efficiency, some innovation and flexibility in business
processes. At the same time the distinction between web services and grid services is expected to disappear,
with the capabilities of one merging into the other and the interoperability between the two standards being
taken for granted.

Medium Term
In the midterm (say a five year timeframe) expect to see wider adoption - largely for resource virtualization and
mass access. The technology will be particularly appropriate for applications that utilize broadband and
mobile/air interfaces, such as on-line gaming, „visualization-on-demand‟ and applied industrial research. The
emphasis will move from use within a single organization to use across organizational domains and within
Virtual Organizations, requiring issues such as ownership, management and accounting to be handled within
trusted partnerships. There will be a shift in value from provision of computer power to provision of information
and knowledge. At the same time open standards based tooling for building service oriented applications are
likely to emerge and Grid technology will start to be incorporated into off-the-shelf‟ products. This will lead to
standard consumer access to virtualized compute and data resources, enabling a whole new range of consumer
services to be delivered.

Long Term
In the longer term, Grid is likely to become a prerequisite for business success - central to business processes,
new types of service, and a central component of product development and customer solutions. A key business
change will be the establishment of trusted service providers, probably acting on a global scale and disrupting
the current supply chains and regulatory environments.

Refernces
1. F.J.Corbat and V.A.Vyssotshy,”Introduction and overview of the Multics System”, Proc. AFIPS 1965
FJCC, 27(1), 1965, 185-196.
2. D.Skillicorn and D.Talia,”Models and Languages for Parallel Computation”, ACM Computing
Surveys, 30(2), 1998, 123-169.
3. R.Stevens, P.Woodward, T.DeFanti and C.Catlett, “From the I-WAY to the National Technology
Grid”, Communication of the ACM,40(11), 1997, 51-60.
4. I.Foster, C.Kesselman and S.Tuecke,”The Nexcus Task-Parallel Runtime System,” in Proceedings of
First International Workshop on Parallel Processing,1994,457-462.

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