Grid Computing: An Insight into Heterogeneous Computing Environment

Abstract

-Duringthe last decade there has been a significant increase incomputational capability of computers, data storage and the way communication takes place. However, with such advancement, there still exist someproblems which are quite complex in nature and require a very high computation power to solve them. The extensive use and increased popularity of the Internet and the availability of high-speed communicational networks have significantly changed the way we do computing. These technologies have enabled the coordination and cooperative use of a wide variety of geographically distributed resources to come together as a single more powerful computer. Such a new method of pooling resources to solve large-scale complex problems is called as grid computing. This paper describes the concepts and components underlying the grid computing.Keywords: Grid components, Complexity levels, fabric layer, Rehosting, OGSA, OGSI. I. INTRODUCTIONThe main purpose of distributed computing is to provide users with a platform which allows them a low cost, easy, and transparent method of access to a wide variety of heterogeneous resources. Such an integration of multiple different resources over a network is called Metacomputing. Metacomputing done at lowest level on local area networks (LAN) is termed as Cluster Computing whereas integration of vide variety of heterogeneous resources done on wide area networks (WAN) is termed as Grid Computing.Grid computing is a virtualized distributed computing environment that aims at allowing the dynamic selection, sharing, and integration of distributed heterogeneous resources based on the availability, capability, performance and cost of these computing resources. It was actually in the mid-1990s the word grid was applied to computing by the extension and advancement of concept "computer Time-sharing". Fundamentally, the concept of grid computing is quite straightforward such that with grid computing an organization can seamlessly integrate, access and share dispersed heterogeneous resources like, hosts, servers, storage systems, data, and networks into one collaborative, in order to solve a specific task or achieve a specific goal [1].In this paper we have presented detailed description of grid computing concepts, its characteristics and other important concepts which help in understanding grid computing architecture. Section II describes various characteristics of a computational grid, Section III describes the Grid Components and Complexity levels, Section IV provides a detailed grid architecture, Section V provides a detailed comparison of different approaches of grid computing, section VI presents descriptions of various standards used in grid computing. Finally section VII presents the conclusion of the study.