13. Distributed Computing – GRID Computing

Abstract

The idea of GRID computing originated in the scientific community and was initially motivated by processing power and storage intensive applications [213]. The basic objective of GRID computing is to support resource sharing among individuals and institutions (organizational units), or resource entities within a networked infrastructure. Resources that can be shared are, for example, bandwidth, storage, processing capacity, and data [304, 429]. The resources pertain to organizations and institutions across the world; they can belong to a single enterprize or be in an external resource-sharing and service provider relationship. On the GRID, they form distributed, heterogeneous, dynamic virtual organizations [221]. The GRID provides a resource abstractions in which the resources are represented by services. Through the strong service-orientation the GRID effectively becomes a networked infrastructure of interoperating services. The driving vision behind this is the idea of “service-oriented science” [215].