Grid Technologies

Book excerpt: Grid computing denotes an approach to utilize distributed resources that are not subject to centralized control. This approach fulfils computing requirements arising within the context of current high-performance computing applications, especially in the field of computational science and engineering.This idea is analogous to an electric power network (grid), where power generators are distributed, but the users are able to access electric power without bothering about the source of energy and its location.Current grid enabling technologies consist of stand-alone architectures. A typical architecture provides middleware access to various services at different hierarchical levels. Computational grids enable the sharing, selection and aggregation of a wide variety of geographically distributed computational resources (such as supercomputers, clusters of computers, storage systems, data sources, instruments, people, etc.) and present them as a single, unified resource for solving large-scale computations and data intensive computing applications (e.g., molecular modeling for drug design, brain activity analysis, high energy physics, etc.).Grid computing is a new emerging research area aiming to promote the development and advancement of technologies that provide seamless and scalable access to wide-area distributed resources.