Irbid National University

Information Technology Department

Grid computing systems

Grid Computing System

Through the evolution of all sciences fields, researching areas, and series of projects which requires a massive amount of computational power, makes the extension of using more powerful resources to handle this evolution, is extremely mandatory.Grid computing Is an involving network application that can be expected to become an essentially and necessary component of the new global knowledge economy ofthe 21's century. Grid computing can mean different things to different individual,The grand vision is often presented as an analogy to power grids where users (or electrical appliances) get access to electricity through wall sockets with no care or consideration for where or how the electricity isActually generated.

In this view of grid computing , computing becomes pervasive and individual users or client applications can gain access to computing resources (processors, storage, data, applications,.. and so on) as needed with little or no knowledge of where those resources are located or what the underlying technologies, hardware, operating system the other clientsAre uses.

Grid computing … definitions and facts.• A type of parallel and distributed system that

enables the sharing, selection, and aggregation of geographically distributed resources dynamically at runtime depending on their availability, capability performance, cost, and users’ quality-of-service requirements

Today there are many definitions of Grid computing…

The definitive definition of a Grid is provided by Ian Foster in his article “What is the grid computing, A Three Point Checklist”… The three points of this checklist are: 1. Computing resources are not administered centrally. 2. Open standards are used .3. Non-trivial quality of service is achieved.

• Plaszczak/Wellner define Grid technology as “the technology that enables resource virtualization, on-demand provisioning, and service (resource) sharing between organizations.”

• IBM defines Grid Computing as “the ability, using a set of open standards and protocols, to gain access to applications and data, processing power, storage capacity and a vast array of other computing resources over the Internet “.

Definitions of Grid computing

Some facts about grid Computing

Grid computing: is the act of sharing tasks over multiple computers, these computers joins together to create virtual supercomputer.

Grids use the resources of many separate computers connected by a network (usually internet).

The most obvious resource included in a grid is a processor …. But grids also encompass sensors, data storage, applications and other resources.

A scenario in which a local scheduler of network system can schedule its jobs. This combines hardware load sharing and distributed computer.Grid computing creating an environment in which no system is idle.6- Grid is composed of number of hosts. Each has several resources

which may be homogeneous or heterogeneous.  

Benefits or goal of grid computing

*In most organizations there are large amount of underutilized computing resources. Most desktop machines are busily less than 5% of time over a business day… In same organization, even theServer machine can often be relatively idle.As a solution … Grid computing provides a framework for exploiting these underutilized resources and thus has the possibility of substantially increasing the efficiency of resourceUsage.* Processing resources are not the only ones that may be underutilized; often machines may

have enormous unused disk drive capacity.*grid computing (more specially , data grid ) can be use much larger virtual data store…

possibly configured to achieve improved performance and reliability over that of any single machine.