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 democratic Grid: collaboration, sharing and computing for everyone

This paper presents an integrated vision, architecture, middleware and applications of a public and large scale Grid for everyone: supporting collaboration for groups of people who can interact and share work and share or trade computing resources among them. This public Grid is decentralized and self-adapting to the dynamics of the online world with networks, computers and people who come and go, fail and recover and applications with varying loads and resource needs. Initial evaluation based on the first release of the middleware components and applications shows how our Grid can operate in a dynamic and decentralized environment by a combination of pooling and market mechanisms that adapt supply and demand for resources, self-managing services and applications that react to environmental changes and generic data-sharing services for concurrent write-sharing. The potential for societal impact is enormous as it can open Grid computing and collaboration to everyone on the Internet.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author’s final draft

Active yellow pages: a pipelined resource management architecture for wide-area network computing

This paper describes a novel, pipelined resource management architecture for computational grids. The design is based on two key realizations. One is that resource management involves a sequence of tasks that is best handled by a pipeline. As shown in the paper, this approach results, in a scalable architecture for decentralized scheduling. The other realization is that static aggregation of resources for improved scheduling is inadequate in wide-area computing environments because the needs of users and jobs change with both, location and time. The described architecture addresses this problem by dynamically aggregating resources in a manner that continuously optimizes system response. This is accomplished by way of an active yellow pages directory that allows aggregation constraints to be (re)defined on the fly. An initial prototype of the active yellow pages service has been deployed in the PUNCH network computing environment. Experiences with the production PUNCH system and preliminary results from controlled experiments indicate that the active yellow pages service performs well.Peer Reviewe

Towards a grid-enabled simulation framework for nano-CMOS electronics

The electronics design industry is facing major challenges as transistors continue to decrease in size. The next generation of devices will be so small that the position of individual atoms will affect their behaviour. This will cause the transistors on a chip to have highly variable characteristics, which in turn will impact circuit and system design tools. The EPSRC project "Meeting the Design Challenges of Nano-CMOS Electronics" (Nana-CMOS) has been funded to explore this area. In this paper, we describe the distributed data-management and computing framework under development within Nano-CMOS. A key aspect of this framework is the need for robust and reliable security mechanisms that support distributed electronics design groups who wish to collaborate by sharing designs, simulations, workflows, datasets and computation resources. This paper presents the system design, and an early prototype of the project which has been useful in helping us to understand the benefits of such a grid infrastructure. In particular, we also present two typical use cases: user authentication, and execution of large-scale device simulations

Economic-based Distributed Resource Management and Scheduling for Grid Computing

Computational Grids, emerging as an infrastructure for next generation computing, enable the sharing, selection, and aggregation of geographically distributed resources for solving large-scale problems in science, engineering, and commerce. As the resources in the Grid are heterogeneous and geographically distributed with varying availability and a variety of usage and cost policies for diverse users at different times and, priorities as well as goals that vary with time. The management of resources and application scheduling in such a large and distributed environment is a complex task. This thesis proposes a distributed computational economy as an effective metaphor for the management of resources and application scheduling. It proposes an architectural framework that supports resource trading and quality of services based scheduling. It enables the regulation of supply and demand for resources and provides an incentive for resource owners for participating in the Grid and motives the users to trade-off between the deadline, budget, and the required level of quality of service. The thesis demonstrates the capability of economic-based systems for peer-to-peer distributed computing by developing users' quality-of-service requirements driven scheduling strategies and algorithms. It demonstrates their effectiveness by performing scheduling experiments on the World-Wide Grid for solving parameter sweep applications