Open Grid: A User-Centric Approach for Grid Computing
Walfredo Cirne, Keith Marzullo · 2001
The possibility of combining multiple machines geographically dispersed as the platform for the execution of parallel applications is enticing, having sparked considerable research in an area that has been called Grid Computing. Despite intensive research effort, though, those for whom Grid Computing has been aimed have been slow to adopt this new technology. We claim that there are two main reasons for that. First, the user has not been properly supported in her everyday activities in the sense that there is a lack of a cohesive gridwide working environment. Second, current efforts assume that the software they generate will be widely deployed across the whole grid, which is hard to achieve due to the specialized interest in high-performance computation. In this paper, we argue that the massive acceptance of Grid Computing technology depends on building solutions that are open (do not require a particular infrastructure), extensible (ease the addition of refinements) and complete (cover the whole production cycle). We then describe our system, called Open Grid, that implements our viewpoint and targets users of coarse-grain parallel applications. We hope that Open Grid will constitute itself into a step towards a widely used computational grid. Keywords -- Grid Computing; Internet Computing; Massively Parallel Processing I.