Global Grids and Software Toolkits: A Study of Four Grid Middleware Technologies

Abstract

Grid is an infrastructure that involves the integrated and collaborative use of computers, networks, databases and scientific instruments owned and managed by multiple organizations. Grid applications often involve large amounts of data and/or computing resources that require secure resource sharing across organizational boundaries. This makes Grid application management and deployment a complex undertaking. Grid middlewares provide users with seamless computing ability and uniform access to resources in the heterogeneous Grid environment. Several software toolkits and systems have been developed, most of which are results of academic research projects, all over the world. This chapter will focus on four of these middlewares-UNICORE, Globus, Legion and Gridbus. It also presents our implementation of a resource broker for UNICORE as this functionality was not supported in it. A comparison of these systems on the basis of the architecture, implementation model and several other features is included.

Multimedia On Global Grids: A Case Study In Distributed Ray Tracing

“…The distributed resources could be logical or physical clusters, supercomputers, servers and ordinary PCs which run a variety of operating systems (such as UNIX variants or Windows) [8].…”

Enhancing reliability with Latin Square redundancy on desktop grids.

“…In [17] Asadzadeh, Buyya and others examme four global grid systems and software toolkits. They organize the grid middleware into a four layered stack.…”

“…Grid portals on the web offer interfaces to job submission services and methods to collect the results. Figure 2.2: A layered grid architecture and components (adapted from [17]) .…”

“…The administrative aspect is that which differentiates a grid from a cluster and to some degree determines other factors including the grid middleware. The term grid middleware is defined in [17] as the software layer that resides on top of the heterogeneous set of operating system resources in the grid providing uniform functionality and services to grid applications and distributed systems.…”

“…A detailed description and comparison of four of them --Gridbus, Globus, Legion, and Unicore -some of which have been discussed previously, is available from Asadzadeh, Raj kumar, Buyya and others in [17]. Globus is a special case in some respects because it supplies a set of low level tools to developers of other middleware.…”