Scaling up data intensive scientific applications to campus grids
Douglas Thain · 2009
A campus grid aggregates computing and storage capacity from many clusters, desktops, and servers to provide a cost-effective large scale computing facility for an entire institution. Many universities today operate campus grids on the scale of thousands to tens of thousands of nodes. However, the people that might derive the most benefit from campus grids are generally accustomed to using single computers or conventional clusters. Making the jump from a single cluster to a campus grid can be very challenging, because the user or programmer must contend with a host of performance and reliability challenges that only arise in large scale systems.