Grid and Cloud Computing: Concepts and Practical Applications

Book excerpt: The distributed computing infrastructure known as ‘the Grid’ has undoubtedly been one of the most successful science-oriented large- scale IT projects of the past 20 years. It is now a fully operational international entity, encompassing several hundred computing sites on all continents and giving access to hundreds of thousands of CPU (central processing unit) cores and hundreds of petabytes of storage, all connected by robust national and international scientific networks. It has evolved to become the main computational platform many scientific communities. This book presents lectures from the Enrico Fermi International School of Physics summer school Grid and Cloud computing: Concepts and Practical Applications, held in Varenna, Italy, in July 2014. The school aimed to cover the conceptual and practical aspects of both the Grid and Cloud computing. The proceedings included here are divided into eight chapters, with chapters 1, 2, 3 and 8 covering general applications of Grid and Cloud computing in various scientific fields, while chapters 4, 5, 6 and 7 discuss specific technical areas of Grid and Cloud structures. The book will be of interest to all those whose work involves the use of the Grid or Cloud computing.