"Grid" computing has emerged as an important new field, distinguished from conventional distributed computing by its focus on large-scale resource sharing, innovative applications, and, in some cases, high performance orientation. In this article, the authors define this new field. First, they review the "Grid problem," which is defined as flexible, secure, coordinated resource sharing among dynamic collections of individuals, institutions, and resources--what is referred to as virtual organizations. In such settings, unique authentication, authorization, resource access, resource discovery, and other challenges are encountered. It is this class of problem that is addressed by Grid technologies. Next, the authors present an extensible and open Grid architecture, in which protocols, services, application programming interfaces, and software development kits are categorized according to their roles in enabling resource sharing. The authors describe requirements that they believe any such mechanisms must satisfy and discuss the importance of defining a compact set of intergrid protocols to enable interoperability among different Grid systems. Finally, the authors discuss how Grid technologies relate to other contemporary technologies, including enterprise integration, application service provider, storage service provider, and peer-to-peer computing. They maintain that Grid concepts and technologies complement and have much to contribute to these other approaches.

The Anatomy of the Grid: Enabling Scalable Virtual Organizations

A 2001 IBM manifesto observed that a looming software complexity crisis -caused by applications and environments that number into the tens of millions of lines of code - threatened to halt progress in computing. The manifesto noted the almost impossible difficulty of managing current and planned computing systems, which require integrating several heterogeneous environments into corporate-wide computing systems that extend into the Internet. Autonomic computing, perhaps the most attractive approach to solving this problem, creates systems that can manage themselves when given high-level objectives from administrators. Systems manage themselves according to an administrator's goals. New components integrate as effortlessly as a new cell establishes itself in the human body. These ideas are not science fiction, but elements of the grand challenge to create self-managing computing systems.

The vision of autonomic computing

http://cloud.pubs.dbs.uni-leipzig.de/sites/cloud.pubs.dbs.uni-leipzig.de/files/Brandic2008CloudcomputingandemergingITplatformsVisionhypeand.pdf

Cloud computing and emerging IT platforms: Vision, hype, and reality for delivering computing as the 5th utility

"Grid" computing has emerged as an important new field, distinguished from conventional distributed computing by its focus on large-scale resource sharing, innovative applications, and, in some cases, high-performance orientation. In this article, we define this new field. First, we review the "Grid problem," which we define as flexible, secure, coordinated resource sharing among dynamic collections of individuals, institutions, and resources-what we refer to as virtual organizations. In such settings, we encounter unique authentication, authorization, resource access, resource discovery, and other challenges. It is this class of problem that is addressed by Grid technologies. Next, we present an extensible and open Grid architecture, in which protocols, services, application programming interfaces, and software development kits are categorized according to their roles in enabling resource sharing. We describe requirements that we believe any such mechanisms must satisfy, and we discuss the central role played by the intergrid protocols that enable interoperability among different Grid systems. Finally, we discuss how Grid technologies relate to other contemporary technologies, including enterprise integration, application service provider, storage service provider, and peer-to-peer computing. We maintain that Grid concepts and technologies complement and have much to contribute to these other approaches.

The Anatomy of the Grid - Enabling Scalable Virtual Organizations

In both e-business and e-science, we often need to integrate services across distributed, heterogeneous, dynamic “virtual organizations” formed from the disparate resources within a single enterprise and/or from external resource sharing and service provider relationships. This integration can be technically challenging because of the need to achieve various qualities of service when running on top of different native platforms. We present an Open Grid Services Architecture that addresses these challenges. Building on concepts and technologies from the Grid and Web services communities, this architecture defines a uniform exposed service semantics (the Grid service); defines standard mechanisms for creating, naming, and discovering transient Grid service instances; provides location transparency and multiple protocol bindings for service instances; and supports integration with underlying native platform facilities. The Open Grid Services Architecture also defines, in terms of Web Services Description Language (WSDL) interfaces and associated conventions, mechanisms required for creating and composing sophisticated distributed systems, including lifetime management, change management, and notification. Service bindings can support reliable invocation, authentication, authorization, and delegation, if required. Our presentation complements an earlier foundational article, “The Anatomy of the Grid,” by describing how Grid mechanisms can implement a service-oriented architecture, explaining how Grid functionality can be incorporated into a Web services framework, and illustrating how our architecture can be applied within commercial computing as a basis for distributed system integration—within and across organizational domains. This is a DRAFT document and continues to be revised. The latest version can be found at http://www.globus.org/research/papers/ogsa.pdf. Please send comments to foster@mcs.anl.gov, carl@isi.edu, jnick@us.ibm.com, tuecke@mcs.anl.gov Physiology of the Grid 2

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The Physiology of the Grid An Open Grid Services Architecture for Distributed Systems Integration

State-of-the-art and emerging scientific applications require fast access to large quantities of data and commensurately fast computational resources. Both resources and data are often distributed in a wide-area network with components administered locally and independently. Computations may involve hundreds of processes that must be able to acquire resources dynamically and communicate efficiently. This paper analyzes the unique security requirements of large-scale distributed (grid) computing and develops a security policy and a corresponding security architecture. An implementation of the architecture within the Globus metacomputing toolkit is discussed.

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A security architecture for computational grids

http://csis.pace.edu/~marchese/CS865/Papers/chervenak_datgrid.pdf

The data grid

This document describes Web Services Agreement Specification (WS-Agreement), a Web Services protocol for establishing agreement between two parties, such as between a service provider and consumer, using an extensible XML language for specifying the nature of the agreement, and agreement templates to facilitate discovery of compatible agreement parties. The specification consists of three parts which may be used in a composable manner: a schema for specifying an agreement, a schema for specifying an agreement template, and a set of port types and operations for managing agreement life-cycle, including creation, expiration, and monitoring of agreement states. GFD-R-P.107 March 14, 2007 Grid Resource Allocation Agreement Protocol (GRAAP) WG graap-wg@ogf.org 2 Table of

Web services agreement specification (ws-agreement)

Metacomputing systems are intended to support remote and/or concurrent use of geographically distributed computational resources. Resource management in such systems is complicated by five concerns that do not typically arise in other situations: site autonomy and heterogeneous substrates at the resources, and application requirements for policy extensibility, co-allocation, and online control. We describe a resource management architecture that addresses these concerns. This architecture distributes the resource management problem among distinct local manager, resource broker, and resource co-allocator components and defines an extensible resource specification language to exchange information about requirements. We describe how these techniques have been implemented in the context of the Globus metacomputing toolkit and used to implement a variety of different resource management strategies. We report on our experiences applying our techniques in a large testbed, GUSTO, incorporating 15 sites, 330 computers, and 3600 processors.

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A resource management architecture for metacomputing systems.

In recent years, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of available computing and storage resources. Yet few tools exist that allow these resources to be exploited effectively in an aggregated form. We present the Condor-G system, which leverages software from Globus and Condor to enable users to harness multi-domain resources as if they all belong to one personal domain. We describe the structure of Condor-G and how it handles job management, resource selection, security, and fault tolerance. We also present results from application experiments with the Condor-G system. We assert that Condor-G can serve as a general-purpose interface to Grid resources, for use by both end users and higher-level program development tools.

Steven Tuecke

Papers

A security architecture for computational grids

The data grid

Web services agreement specification (ws-agreement)

A resource management architecture for metacomputing systems.

Condor-G: A Computation Management Agent for Multi-Institutional Grids