- In the world of emerging standards that this talk focuses on,
"the grid" is based on the The Globus
Toolkit and related software and practices. The Open Grid
Systems Architecture (OGSA) is a standard that defines grid-based
communication, interoperability and security.
- At a base level, grid computing involves communication and
coordination among applications (presumably running on different
computers). The core method for doing this is very similar to
how Web services (WS) work - in fact, the upcoming version of Globus
simply expands on WS, rather than reinventing them.
- To form a grid, systems (actually, the services they offer -
which in Globus parlance are called portTypes) must join together
in a virtual organization (VO). VOs may be related
to real-world organizations, or can have a different real-world
basis. They can be ongoing or short-lived.
- Applications can be essentially anything suitable for
coarse-grained parallelism or for flow of control across different
computational units. Good candidate applications might be distributed
databases and search systems, or systems with a chain of processes
(i.e., data formation --> computation --> visualization -->
storage).
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