Computing and Data Grids for Science and Engineering
William E. Johnston, Dennis B. Gannon, Bill Nitzberg, Leigh Ann Tanner, Bill Thigpen, Alex Woo · 2000
We use the term "Grid" to refer to a software system that provides uniform and location independent access to geographically and organizationally dispersed, heterogeneous resources that are persistent and supported. While, in general, Grids will provide the infrastructure to support a wide range of services in the scientific environment (e.g. collaboration and remote instrument control) in this paper we focus on services for high performance computing and data handling. We describe the services and architecture of NASA's Information Power Grid ("IPG") -- an early example of a large-scale Grid -- and some of the issues that have come up in its implementation. Keywords: Grids, distributed computing architecture, distributed resource management 1 Introduction "Grids" (see [1]) are an approach for building dynamically constructed problem solving environments using distributed and federated, high performance computing and data handling infrastructure that manages geographically and organ...