Grid and Cloud Computing

Grid: Resource-Sharing Environment

• Users:
– 1000s from 10s institutions
– Well-established communities
• Resources:
– Computers, data,
instruments, storage,
applications
– Owned/administered by
institutions
• Applications: data- and
compute-intensive
processing
• Approach: common
infrastructure
 Grid: Definitions
• Definition 1: Infrastructure that provides dependable,
consistent, pervasive, and inexpensive access to high-
end computational capabilities (1998)

• Definition 2: A system that coordinates resources not

subject to centralized control, using open, general-
purpose protocols to deliver nontrivial Quality of
Service (2002)
 Grid Computing

• Grid computing is the ability to process

information by utilizing a collection of
networked heterogeneous information-
processing components (hardware and
software), all of which are provisioned from
various geographical locations and across
organizational boundaries.[5]
 Cont.
 In grid computing the concept of Virtual
Organizations (VOs) rises. Which means that all
resources were owned by a single organization.
 Two key outcomes exist in grids:
1. The Open Grid Service Architecture (OGSA)
2. The Globus Toolkit.
 OGSA means how grids are created and maintained.
 Cont..
• The Globus Toolkit is a software
middleware package. All that is
required is to install and configure
Globus and then create all required
resources and services.
• grid security approach is the Grid
Security Infrastructure (GSI) which has
been implemented in
• the Globus Toolkit
An Example: The Globus Toolkit

- Initially developed at Argonne National

Lab/University of Chicago and ISI/University of
Southern California
 How It Started
While helping to build/integrate a diverse range of
distributed applications, the same problems kept
showing up over and over again.
– Too hard to keep track of authentication data
(ID/password) across institutions
– Too hard to monitor system and application status
across institutions
– Too many ways to submit jobs
– Too many ways to store & access files and data
– Too many ways to keep track of data
– Too easy to leave “dangling” resources lying around
(robustness)
grid architecture
in a nutshell
 Forget Homogeneity!
• Trying to force
homogeneity on
users is futile.
Everyone has their
own preferences,
sometimes even
dogma.
• The Internet
provides the model…
Cloud: just a new name for Grid?
• Nevertheless YES:
– Problems are the same in clouds and grids
– Common need to manage large facilities
– Define methods to discover, request and use
resources
– Implement highly parallel computations

Grid Computing, MIERSI, DCC/FCUP 12

Cloud: just a new name for Grid?
• YES:
– Reduce the cost of computing
– Increase reliability
– Increase flexibility (third party)

Grid Computing, MIERSI, DCC/FCUP 13

Cloud: just a new name for Grid?
• NO:
– Great increase demand for computing
(clusters, high speed networks)
– Billions of dollars being spent by Amazon,
Google, Microsoft to create real commercial
large-scale systems with hundreds of
thousands of computers – www.top500.org
shows computers with 100,000+ cores
– Analysis of massive data

Grid Computing, MIERSI, DCC/FCUP 14

Clouds: side-by-side comparison with grids
Resource management

• Compute model
– Grids: batch-scheduled (queueing systems)
– Clouds: resources shared by all users at the
same time (??!) in contrast to dedicated
resources in queueing systems

– Maybe one of the major challenges in clouds:

QoS!

Grid Computing, MIERSI, DCC/FCUP 15

Clouds: side-by-side comparison with grids
Resource management
• Data model:
– Grids: concept of virtual data, replica,
metadata catalog, abstract structural
representation
– Data locality: to achieve good scalability data
must be distributed over many computers
– Clouds: use map-reduce mechanism like in
Google to maintain data locality
– Grids: rely on shared file systems (NFS,
GPFS, PVFS, Lustre)
Grid Computing, MIERSI, DCC/FCUP 16
Clouds: side-by-side comparison with grids
Resource management
• Virtualization:
– Abstraction and encapsulation
– Clouds: rely heavily on virtualization
– Grids: do not rely on virtualization as much as
clouds. One example of use in Grids: Nimbus
(previous Virtual Workspace Service)

Grid Computing, MIERSI, DCC/FCUP 17

 Grid Projects

• NAREGI ( National Research Grid Initiative) is a

grid project that focuses on the research and
development of grid middleware.
• The test contains almost 3000 CPUs and is
capable of 17 teraflops of processing power,
offered from various research institutions
throughout Japan.

• BOINC is an Open-source software

for volunteer computing and grid computing.
• BOINC is supported by the National Science
Foundation(SETI@home, Climateprediction.net)
 Grid vs Cloud
1. Neither grids nor clouds have a commonly
accepted definition.
2. Grids are publicly funded and operated,
whereas clouds are privately funded and
operated.
3. Grids and clouds are instantiations of distributed
systems, which is a common feature of them.
4. Grids evolve slowly and clouds evolve fast, and
The level of expertise to use a cloud is
significantly lower than that of a grids.