Grid computing enables the aggregation of distributed resources and transparent access to them.
Most production grids such as TeraGrid and EGEE seek to share compute and storage resources distributed across different administrative domains, with their main focus being speeding up a broad range of scientific applications, such as climate modelling, drug design, and protein analysis.
A key aspect of the grid vision realization has been building standard Web services-based protocols that allow distributed resources to be “discovered, accessed, allocated, monitored, accounted for, and billed for, etc., and in general managed as a single virtual system",
The Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) addresses this need for standardization by defining a set of core capabilities and behaviours that address key concerns in grid systems.
Ensuring QoS in grids has been perceived as a difficult endeavour. Lack of performance isolation has prevented grid adoption.
Activities associated with one user or virtual organization (VO) can influence, in an uncontrollable way, the performance perceived by other users using the same platform. Therefore, the impossibility of enforcing QoS and guaranteeing execution time became a problem, especially for time-critical applications
On grids is the availability of resources with diverse software configurations, including disparate operating systems, libraries, compilers, runtime environments, and so forth. At the same time, user applications would often run only on specially customized environments. Consequently, a portability barrier has often been present on most grid infrastructures, inhibiting users of adopting grids as utility computing environments
Virtualization technology has been identified as the perfect fit to issues that have caused frustration when using grids, such as hosting many dissimilar software applications on a single physical platform. In this direction, some research projects (e.g., Globus VirtualWorkspaces ) aimed at evolving grids to support an additional layer to virtualize computation, storage, and network resources.
Grid Computing is a distributed computing architecture, In Grid Computing, resources are used in a collaborative pattern, and also in grid computing, the users do not pay for use.
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