Global Grids and Software Toolkits: A Study of Four Grid Middleware Technologies

Grid is an infrastructure that involves the integrated and collaborative use of computers, networks, databases and scientific instruments owned and managed by multiple organizations. Grid applications often involve large amounts of data and/or computing resources that require secure resource sharing across organizational boundaries. This makes Grid application management and deployment a complex undertaking. Grid middlewares provide users with seamless computing ability and uniform access to resources in the heterogeneous Grid environment. Several software toolkits and systems have been developed, most of which are results of academic research projects, all over the world. This chapter will focus on four of these middlewares--UNICORE, Globus, Legion and Gridbus. It also presents our implementation of a resource broker for UNICORE as this functionality was not supported in it. A comparison of these systems on the basis of the architecture, implementation model and several other features is included.Comment: 19 pages, 10 figure

A Taxonomy of Data Grids for Distributed Data Sharing, Management and Processing

Data Grids have been adopted as the platform for scientific communities that need to share, access, transport, process and manage large data collections distributed worldwide. They combine high-end computing technologies with high-performance networking and wide-area storage management techniques. In this paper, we discuss the key concepts behind Data Grids and compare them with other data sharing and distribution paradigms such as content delivery networks, peer-to-peer networks and distributed databases. We then provide comprehensive taxonomies that cover various aspects of architecture, data transportation, data replication and resource allocation and scheduling. Finally, we map the proposed taxonomy to various Data Grid systems not only to validate the taxonomy but also to identify areas for future exploration. Through this taxonomy, we aim to categorise existing systems to better understand their goals and their methodology. This would help evaluate their applicability for solving similar problems. This taxonomy also provides a "gap analysis" of this area through which researchers can potentially identify new issues for investigation. Finally, we hope that the proposed taxonomy and mapping also helps to provide an easy way for new practitioners to understand this complex area of research.Comment: 46 pages, 16 figures, Technical Repor

A Case for Cooperative and Incentive-Based Coupling of Distributed Clusters

Research interest in Grid computing has grown significantly over the past five years. Management of distributed resources is one of the key issues in Grid computing. Central to management of resources is the effectiveness of resource allocation as it determines the overall utility of the system. The current approaches to superscheduling in a grid environment are non-coordinated since application level schedulers or brokers make scheduling decisions independently of the others in the system. Clearly, this can exacerbate the load sharing and utilization problems of distributed resources due to suboptimal schedules that are likely to occur. To overcome these limitations, we propose a mechanism for coordinated sharing of distributed clusters based on computational economy. The resulting environment, called \emph{Grid-Federation}, allows the transparent use of resources from the federation when local resources are insufficient to meet its users' requirements. The use of computational economy methodology in coordinating resource allocation not only facilitates the QoS based scheduling, but also enhances utility delivered by resources.Comment: 22 pages, extended version of the conference paper published at IEEE Cluster'05, Boston, M

Experimental Study of Remote Job Submission and Execution on LRM through Grid Computing Mechanisms

Remote job submission and execution is fundamental requirement of distributed computing done using Cluster computing. However, Cluster computing limits usage within a single organization. Grid computing environment can allow use of resources for remote job execution that are available in other organizations. This paper discusses concepts of batch-job execution using LRM and using Grid. The paper discusses two ways of preparing test Grid computing environment that we use for experimental testing of concepts. This paper presents experimental testing of remote job submission and execution mechanisms through LRM specific way and Grid computing ways. Moreover, the paper also discusses various problems faced while working with Grid computing environment and discusses their trouble-shootings. The understanding and experimental testing presented in this paper would become very useful to researchers who are new to the field of job management in Grid.Comment: Fourth International Conference on Advanced Computing & Communication Technologies (ACCT), 201

FORESTLAND OWNERSHIP IN ONEIDA AND VILAS COUNTIES, WISCONSIN, 1975-1994

Privately owned forests in the United States are being divided, roaded, and developed by increasing numbers of second-home buyers, retirees, and recreation enthusiasts. Forested parcels adjacent to or embedded in public land are considered especially desirable and a premium is being paid for the aesthetic or recreational amenities associated with such properties. However, virtually all information on variations in forestland prices in northern Wisconsin is anecdotal. One objective of this study was to identify parcel characteristics that influenced forestland prices in Vilas and Oneida counties, Wisconsin, between 1975 and 1994. A second objective was to ascertain what impact the creation and expansion of the Northern Highland-American Legion State Forest (NHALSF) had on the forestland market in Vilas and Oneida counties during this time period. Several trends suggest that the drive to acquire forestland for the construction of second homes in Vilas and Oneida counties is strong and that the NHALSF continues to impact forestland prices. Forestland in Vilas and Oneida counties was shown to react to macroeconomic forces as if it were a luxury good (that is, declining sales during a recession, increasing sales during an economic upturn) and not simply a timber resource. Positive relationships were identified between the per-acre price of forestland, the presence of highway frontage, and parcel size for the years 1975, 1980, and 1990. Forested parcels adjacent to the NHALSF were shown to have higher per-acre prices than parcels without frontage on the NHALSF. The acquisition of land by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (WDNR) to expand the NHALSF has continued in recent decades, taking large quantities of land off the "open market." The reduced supply of available parcels in and near the NHALSF, as well as the highly desirable nature of owning forestland with frontage on public land, has caused the price of the remaining privately owned forestland in Vilas and Oneida counties to increase faster than similar forestland in other northern counties of Wisconsin.Forests and forestry--Wisconsin--Oneida County, Forests and forestry--Wisconsin-- Vilas County, Forest landowners--Wisconsin, Real property--Wisconsin, Real property--Prices--Wisconsin, Land prices--United States--Wisconsin, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Acts of Heritage, Acts of Value: Memorializing at the Chattri Indian Memorial, UK

The Chattri Indian Memorial is a public site that hosts and embodies heritage in complex ways. Standing on the edge of Brighton, UK in a once-remote part of the Sussex Downs, the Memorial was built in 1921 to honour Indian soldiers who fought on the Western Front during the First World War. As both a sacred place and a space of socio-cultural heritagization processes, the monument is an enduring testament of past values of war heroism, but also more ephemeral practices of ritual. The article documents the heritage-making at work within memorialization at the Chattri as a case study, examining how differing ‘valuations’ of a memorial site can be enacted through time, between material form and immaterial practices, and across cultures. The article theorizes participants’ current affective practices as conscious ‘past presencing’ (Macdonald, 2013), and analyses how their conscious acts of heritage-making affectively enacted values of morality, community and belonging

Extending and Implementing the Self-adaptive Virtual Processor for Distributed Memory Architectures

Many-core architectures of the future are likely to have distributed memory organizations and need fine grained concurrency management to be used effectively. The Self-adaptive Virtual Processor (SVP) is an abstract concurrent programming model which can provide this, but the model and its current implementations assume a single address space shared memory. We investigate and extend SVP to handle distributed environments, and discuss a prototype SVP implementation which transparently supports execution on heterogeneous distributed memory clusters over TCP/IP connections, while retaining the original SVP programming model