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What is the Grid? |
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The grid is an emerging new technology, which is already opening exciting new opportunities for e-science and e-business. One concise definition of the Grid (as written by Ian Foster and Carl Kesselman, of the Globus project) is: "The Grid is an infrastructure that enables flexible, secure, coordinated resource sharing among dynamic collections of individuals, institutions and resources." A 'resource' may be computing power, data storage, analysis/visualisation tools, scientific hardware (a spectrometer, telescope and so on) or any other remote resource. The Grid aims to bring all these together -- in a virtual sense -- allowing large or small scale resource sharing and collaboration. We are investigating suitable Grid-based tools for job handling, data storage, analysis and visualization for our molecular dynamics and immunology work. A key aspect of this new technology is the software that allows these resources to share information, so-called 'middleware'. The Globus project is a major contributor in this area, although standards are still being decided upon. Crucially, middleware must enable the right resources to be located, and allow them to communicate data as required, all within a secure environment. In many ways, the Grid can be thought of as a much more powerful form of the World Wide Web and its Web services, but with a wider variety of resources and services, and improved security and integration. Although 'peer-to-peer' projects such as SETI@home and Distributed folding can be thought of as Grid projects, the scope of the Grid is much wider than just utilising distributed CPU on idle client PCs. The schematic below shows how a client PC might can 'plug-in' to the Grid, bringing together a range of resources on the internet, including supercomputing/clusters, remote database storage and much more, to enable a collaborative project. Communicating with fellow workers is also possible via Grid technology. The middleware can be thought of as the 'hub' to the Grid, allowing these different components to work together securely and efficiently.
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Resources |
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