UNIT I : INTRODUCTION (2 marks)

UNIT I : INTRODUCTION

1. State High Performance Computing (HPC)?

HPC: use of parallel processing to execute large programs quickly; often equated
to supercomputers, typically applied to systems generating teraflops (1012) or more. Emphasis:
raw speed performance and accuracy
2. State High Throughput Computing (HTC)?
HTC: running a job that takes days to complete, or an application that must produce a
high number of completed operations per unit of time. Performance measured in flops per month
or year, as opposed to per second.eg high-flux computing is in Internet searches and web
services, Emphasis: batch processing speed, cost, energy savings, security, and reliability.
3. Define Moore’s law?
Moore’s law indicates that processor speed doubles every 18 months.

4. What are computational grids?

A computational grid is hardware and software infrastructure that provides dependable,
consistent, pervasive and inexpensive access to high-end computational capabilities.

5. What is meant by grid infrastructure?

Grid infrastructure is a complex combination of a number of capabilities and resources
identified for the specific problem and environment being addressed. It forms the core
foundations for successful grid applications.

6. What are the derivatives of grid computing?

There are 8 derivatives of grid computing. They are as follows:
a) Compute grid
b) Data grid
c) Science grid
d) Access grid
e) Knowledge grid
f) Cluster grid
g) Terra grid
h) Commodity grid

7. What are the grid computing applications?

Application partitioning that involves breaking the problem into discrete pieces.
Discovery and scheduling of tasks and workflow. Data communications distributing the problem
data where and when it is required.

8. Define Cluster computing:

Cluster is local to the domain and constructed to solve inadequate computing power. It is
related to the pooling of computational resources to provide more computing power by parallel
execution of the workload.
 9. Define SOA.
Service oriented architecture is intended to define loosely coupled and interoperable
services applications, and to define process for integrating these interoperable components. In
SOA, the system is decomposed into a collection of network-connected components.
Applications and resources within a SOA shouldn’t be built as a tightly coupled monolithic
model. Rather; these applications are composed dynamically from the deployed and available
services in the network.

10. What are the business areas needs in Grid computing?

· Life Sciences
· Financial services
· Higher Education
· Engineering Services
· Government
· Collaborative games

11. Write the any three Grid Applications.

• Schedulers
• Resource Broker
• Load Balancing

12. What are the two most important technologies for building semantic webs?
XML
Resource Description Framework(RDF)

13. What is meant by Virtual Machines?

Virtual machines (VMs) offer novel solutions to underutilized resources, application
inflexibility, and software manageability, and security concerns in existing physical machines.

14. What are the business benefits in Grid Computing?

· Acceleration of implementation time frames in order to intersect with the anticipated business
end results.
· Improved productivity and collaboration of virtual organizations and respective computing
and data resources.
· Allowing widely dispersed departments and business to create virtual organizations to share
data and resources.

15. What are the areas are difficult to implement in Grid Computing Infrastructure?
A Grid computing infrastructure component must address several potentially complicated
areas in many stages of the implementation. These areas are
· Security
· Resource management
· Information services
· Data management

16. Give the different layers of grid architecture.

· Fabric Layer: Interface to local resources
· Connectivity Layer: Manages Communications
· Collective Layer: Coordinating Multiple Resources
· Application Layer: User-Defined Application.

17.What do you mean by Grid Services?

Grid services are stateful Web services. The service itself maintains some state
information and it exposes a set of standard interfaces to enable interactions with its client.

18. Define Hype Cycle

This cycle shows the expectations for the technology at five different
stages. The expectations rise sharply from the trigger period to a high peak of inflated
expectations.Through a short period of disillusionment, the expectation may drop to a valley and
then increase steadily over a long enlightenment period to a plateau of productivity. The number
of years for an emerging technology to reach a certain stage is marked by special symbols.

19. Difference between CPU and GPU ?

A Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) is a special purpose processor, optimized or
calculations commonly (and repeatedly) required for Computer Graphics, particularly SIMD
operations.
A Central Processing Unit (CPU) is a general purpose processor - it can in principle do
any computation, but not necessarily in an optimal fashion for any given computation. One can
do graphics processing on a CPU - but it likely will not produce the result anywhere nearly as
fast as a properly programmed GPU.

20.what is meant by NAS and SAN ?

A storage area network (SAN) connects servers to network storage such as disk arrays.
Network attached storage (NAS) connects client hosts directly to the disk arrays.