UNIT – V (Part-1)

Grid Computing (GC)

 Contents
1. Definition of Grid
2. Grid Types
3. Grid Benefits
4. Grid Applications
5. Drawbacks of GC
6. Grid Components
7. Grid Architecture and its relation to various
distributed technologies
 1. Definition of Grid
• The term grid computing originated in the early 1990s as a
metaphor for making computer power as easy to access as an
electric power grid.
• The most common description of Grid computing includes an
analogy to a power grid.
• When you plug an appliance or other object requiring electrical
power into a receptacle, you expect that there is power of the
correct voltage available, but the actual source of that power is
not known.
• The ideas of the grid (including those from distributed
computing, object-oriented programming, and Web services)
were brought together by Ian Foster, Carl Kesselman, and Steve
Tuecke, widely regarded as the "fathers of the grid“.
 Definition of Grid contd…
• The grid can be thought of as a distributed system with non-
interactive workloads that involve a large number of files.
• GC is the federation of computer resources from multiple
administrative domains to reach a common goal to solve a
single task, and may then disappear just as quickly.
• Early defs: Foster and Kesselman, 1998 : “A computational
grid is a hardware and software infrastructure that provides
dependable, consistent, pervasive, and inexpensive access to
high-end computational facilities”
• Kleinrock 1969: “We will probably see the spread of
‘computer utilities’, which, like present electric and telephone
utilities, will service individual homes and offices across the
country.”
 Definition of Grid contd…
• Grids are a form of distributed computing whereby a super
virtual computer is composed of many networked loosely
coupled computers acting together to perform large tasks.
• For certain applications, “distributed” or “grid” computing,
can be seen as a special type of parallel computing that relies
on complete connected to a network by a conventional
network interface, such as Ethernet.
• Although a single grid can be dedicated to a particular
application, commonly a grid is used for a variety of purposes.
• Grids are often constructed with general-purpose grid
middleware software libraries.
 2. Grid Types (based on uses)
• Computational Grid: provide secure access to huge
pool of shared processing power suitable for high
throughput applications and computation intensive
computing.
• Data Grid: provide an infrastructure to support data
storage, data discovery, data handling, data publication,
and data manipulation of large volumes of data actually
stored in various heterogeneous databases and file
systems.
• Collaboration Grid: With the advent of Internet, there
has been an increased demand for better collaboration.
Such advanced collaboration is possible using the grid.
 Grid Types Contd…
• Scavenging grid: used with large numbers of desktop machines.
Machines are scavenged (search for and collect from discarded waste)
for available CPU cycles and other resources.
• Network Grid: provides fault-tolerant & high-performance
communication services. Each grid node works as a data router
between two communication points, providing data-caching & other
facilities to speed up the communications between such points.
• Utility Grid (UG): is the ultimate form of the Grid, in which not only
data & computation cycles are shared but software or just about any
resource is shared.
• The main services provided through UG are software & special
equipments. For instance, the applications can be run on one machine
and all the users can send their data to be processed to that machine &
receive the result back.
 3. Grid Benefits
• GC has been around for over 12 years now and its
advantages are many.
• GC can be defined in many ways but for these discussions
let's simply call it a way to execute compute jobs across a
distributed set of resources instead of one central
resource.
• Now instead of having one heavily burdened server the
load can be spread evenly across many smaller
computers.
• The distributed nature of grid computing is transparent to
the user.
• Some advantages are quite obvious:
 Grid Benefits Contd…
1. No need to buy large SMP servers for applications that can be
split up and farmed out to smaller commodity type servers.
Results can then be concatenated and analyzed upon job(s)
completion.
2. Much more efficient use of idle resources. Policies can be in
place that allow jobs to only go to servers that are lightly loaded
for the particular application.
3. Grid environments are much more modular and don't have single
points of failure. If one of the servers/desktops within the grid
fail there are plenty of other resources able to pick the load.
4. Policies can be managed by the grid software. A client will reside
on each server which send information back to the master telling
it what type of availability or resources it has to complete
incoming jobs.
 Grid Benefits Contd…
5. This model scales very well. Need more compute
resources? Just plug them in by installing grid client on
additional desktops or servers. They can be removed
just as easily on the fly.
6. Upgrading can be done on the fly without scheduling
downtime. Since there are so many resources some can
be taken offline while leaving enough for work to
continue.
7. Jobs can be executed in parallel speeding performance.
Grid environments are extremely well suited to run jobs
that can be split into smaller chunks and run
concurrently on many nodes.
 4. Grid Applications
• One of the most tantalizing applications of radio
astronomy is the observation of radio signals aspart of
Searches for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI).
• The first SETI project in the late 1950’s used a radio
astronomy dish.
• Some years later the SETI Institute, a privately-funded
organization, was formed to pursue more extensive
searches using various radio telescopes in the U.S.
• The SETI Institute is now building its own array, again
with private funds but in close collaboration with radio
astronomy engineers and researchers at many
observatories and universities.
 Grid Applications Contd…
• Grid computing is now being used for other applications that
include biology, medicine, earth sciences, physics, astronomy,
chemistry, and mathematics.
• The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing
(BOINC) is free, open-source software for volunteer computing
and desktop grid computing.
• Running the BOINC platform allows users to divide work among
multiple grid computing projects, choosing to give only a
percentage of CPU time to each. These projects have tremendous
humanitarian and economic potential.
• Another GC application is climateprediction.net which
investigates the approximations that have to be made in state-of-
the-art climate models by running the models thousands of times
to find out how the models respond to minor variations in the
approximations.
 5. Drawbacks of GC
• Some disadvatages:
1. For memory hungry applications that can't take advantage
of MPI you may be forced to run on a large SMP.
2. You may need to have a fast interconnect between
compute resources.
3. Some applications may need to be tweaked (informal
improve by making fine adjustment) to take full
advantage of the new model.
4. Licensing across many servers may make it prohibitive
for some apps. Vendors are starting to be more flexible
with environment like this.
 Drawbacks of GC Contd…
5. Grid environments include many smaller servers across
various administrative domains. Good tools for
managing change and keeping configurations in sync
with each other can be challenging.
6. Political challenges associated with sharing resources
(especially across different admin domains). Many
groups are reluctant with sharing resources even if it
benefits everyone involved.
 6. Grid Components
• In this section, we describe at a high level the primary
components of a grid environment.
• Depending on the grid design and its expected use, some of
these components may or may not be required, and in some
cases they may be combined to form a hybrid component.
• However, understanding the roles of the components as we
describe them here will help you understand the considerations
when developing grid-enabled applications.
• Like Web Portal, a grid portal provides the interface for a user to
launch applications that will use the resources and services
provided by the grid.
• From this perspective, the user sees the grid as a virtual
computing resource just as the consumer of power sees the
receptacle as an interface to a virtual generator.
 Grid Components Contd…
• One of the most used toolkits for creating and managing a grid
environment is the Globus Toolkit.
• we give you an overview of the key components that make up a
Grid environment, and we present most of our information and
concepts within the context of the Globus Toolkit.
• The key components are:
– Portal/user interface
– Security
– Broker
– Scheduler
– Data management
– Job and resource management
– Other facilities
 Portal/user interface
• The current Globus Toolkit does not provide any services or tools
to generate a portal, but this can be accomplished with tools such
as Web Sphere Portal and Web Sphere Application Server.
• Fig: Possible user view of a grid
 Security
• At the base of any grid environment, there must be mechanisms
to provide security, including authentication, authorization, data
encryption, and so on.
• The Grid Security Infrastructure (GSI) component provides
robust security mechanisms. (see fig)
 Broker
• The Broker functions to identify the available and appropriate
resources to use within the grid.
• Although there is no broker implementation provided by Globus,
there is an information service called the Grid Information Service
(GIS), or more commonly the Monitoring and Discovery Service
(MDS) as shown below figure.
 Scheduler
• Once the resources have been identified, the next logical step is to
schedule the individual jobs to run on them.
• If a set of stand-alone jobs are to be executed with no
interdependencies, then a specialized scheduler may not be
required. (see fig)
 Data management
• If any data/application modules must be moved/ made accessible
to the nodes where an application's jobs will execute, then there
needs to be a secure and reliable method know as Grid Access to
Secondary Storage (GASS), includes facilities such as GridFTP.
 Job and resource management
• The Grid Resource Allocation Manager (GRAM) provides the
services to actually launch a job on a particular resource, check
its status, and retrieve its results when it is complete.
 Other facilities
• There are other facilities that may need to be included
in your grid environment and considered when
designing and implementing your application.
• For instance, inter-process communication and
accounting/chargeback services are two common
facilities that are often required.
 7. Grid Architecture and its relation to
various distributed technologies
• The term grid computing originated in the early 1990s as a
metaphor for making computer power as easy to access as an
electric power grid.
• The most common description of Grid computing includes an
analogy to a power grid.
• When you plug an appliance or other object requiring electrical
power into a receptacle, you expect that there is power of the
correct voltage available, but the actual source of that power is
not known.
 END of

UNIT-V (Part-1)