Special Issue: Middleware for Grid Computing: A ‘Possible Future’
Bruno Richard Schulze, Geoff Coulson, Radha Nandkumar, Peter B. Henderson · Concurrency and Computation Practice and Experience · 2006
The papers in this special issue paint a representative picture of current research issues in Grid computing, in the form of a selection of papers from the Third International Workshop on Middleware for Grid Computing (MGC) [1].All of the papers have been extended and thoroughly revised from the original workshop versions.Previous special issues on selected papers of [2] and [3] have been published in [4] and [5].The papers collected in this special issue address some current issues in middleware for Grid computing.Paventhan et al. [6] describe CoG toolkits enabling Grid application development using commodity development frameworks.Desertot et al. [7] describe how Grid environments can lead to powerful architectures and show that this is the case for edge computing.Zhao et al. [8] propose SVGrid, a Secure Virtual Grid running environment, to protect sensitive files and networks for Grid computers.Santos et al. [9] analyze three accounting schemes to support the implementation of an autonomous reputation-based allocation mechanism for peer-to-peer Grids.Nascimento et al. [10] present the allocation of application processes to the available processors by employing hybrid scheduling in an EasyGrid AMS environment to improve the performance of Grid MPI applications.Yarmolenko and Sakellariou [11] discuss the extensions to the WS-Agreement specification, and their experiences and conclusions are drawn are in the context of agreement-based job management systems.Vargas et al. [12] discuss the assumption of submitting a huge number of tasks and present an elegant solution to the problem by a hierarchical model that can distribute the submission load.In the remainder of this editorial we would like to take a step back from the current research topics to articulate a vision of what Grid computing might be like in the next decade or two.This 'potential future' is influenced by a middleware perspective (as opposed to a Grid user perspective) and is therefore necessarily biased.In particular, we will lay emphasis on the architecture of the 'lowlevel' Grid infrastructure in terms of computer systems, their interconnectivity, and their system-level software.The motivation for offering this vision is to counterbalance, in a small way, the tendency for Grid research efforts to focus on short-term development.In addition to the pragmatic application development that is indeed important and necessary, the long-term health of Grid computing will require a complementary thread of architectural work not unduly influenced by short-term imperatives.