International Journal of Scientific and Research Publications, Volume 3, Issue 8, August 2013 1

ISSN 2250-3153

Grid Computing Architecture and Benefits

Shruti N. Pardeshi1, Chitra Patil2,Snehal Dhumale3
Lecturer,computer department ,SSBT’s COET,Bambhori

Abstract- Grid Computing has become another buzzword iii) Dynamic network resource allocation and
after Web 2.0. However, there are dozens of different definitions reservation,
for Grid Computing and there seems to be no consensus on what iv) Security,
a Grid is. v) High availability and
vi) Multicast to efficiently distribute data to group of
This paper describes about Grid Computing. In various ways we resources.
are trying to explain grid computing along with its architecture
and the standards available for grid computing. Then at last we Grid computing can mean different things to different
have discussed about the benefits of grid computing. individuals. The grand vision is often presented as an analogy to
power grids where users (or electrical appliances) get access to
Index Terms- Grid Computing, connectivity layer, resource electricity through wall sockets with no care or consideration for
layer, application layer, Open Grid Service Architecture where or how the electricity is actually generated.
(OGSA). Open Grid Services Interface (OGSI), OGSA-DAI
(data access and integration), and Web Services Resource In this view of grid computing, computing becomes pervasive
Framework (WSRF). and individual users (or client applications) gain access to
computing resources (processors, storage, data, applications, and
so on) as needed with little or no knowledge of where those
I. INTRODUCTION resources are located or what the underlying technologies,
hardware, operating system, and so on.
G RID computing [1, 2] is a technology for coordinating large
scale resource sharing and problem solving among various
Grid computing could be defined as any of a variety of levels of
autonomous group. Grid technologies are currently distinct from virtualization along a continuum. Exactly where along that
other major technical trends such as internet, enterprise continuum one might say that a particular solution is an
distributed networks and peer to peer computing. Also it has implementation of grid computing versus a relatively simple
some embracing issues in QoS, data management, scheduling, implementation using virtual resources is a matter of opinion.
resource allocation, accounting and performance. But even at the simplest levels of virtualization, one could say
that grid-enabling technologies
Grids are built by various user communities to offer a good
infrastructure which helps the members to solve their specific
problems which are called a grand challenge problem. II. ARCHITECTURE
Grids started off in the mid-90s to address large-scale
A grid consists of different types of resources owned by different computation problems using a network of resource-sharing
and typically independent organizations which results in commodity machines that deliver the computation power
heterogeneity of resources and policies. Because of this, grid affordable only by supercomputers and large dedicated clusters at
based services and applications experience a different resource that time.
behavior than expected. The major motivation was that these high performance
computing resources were expensive and hard to get access to, so
Similarly, a distributed infrastructure with ambitious service put the starting point was to use federated resources that could
more impact on the capabilities of the interconnecting networks comprise compute, storage and network resources from multiple
than other environments. geographically distributed institutions, and such resources are
generally heterogeneous and dynamic.
Grid High Performance Network Group [3] works on network
research, grid infrastructure and development. In their document Grids focused on integrating existing resources with their
the authors listed six main functional requirements, which are hardware, operating systems, local resource management, and
considered as mandatory requirements for grid applications. security infrastructure. In order to support the creation of the so
called “Virtual Organizations”—a logical entity within which
They are: distributed resources can be discovered and shared as if they
i) High performance transport protocol for bulk data were from the same organization, Grids define and provide a set
transfer, of standard protocols, middleware, toolkits, and services built on
ii) Performance controllability, top of these protocols. Interoperability and security are the
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International Journal of Scientific and Research Publications, Volume 3, Issue 8, August 2013 2
ISSN 2250-3153

primary concerns for the Grid infrastructure as resources may

come from different administrative domains, which have both
global and local resource usage policies, different hardware and FABRIC
software configurations and platforms, and vary in availability
and capacity.

Grids provide protocols and services at five different layers as Fig 1. Grid Protocol Architecture
identified in the Grid protocol architecture (see Figure 1). At the
Fabric layer, Grids provide access to different resource types
such as compute, storage and network resource, code repository, The Application layer comprises whatever user applications
etc. Grids usually rely on existing fabric components, for built on top of the above protocols and APIs and operate in VO
instance, local resource managers. environments.

General-purpose components such as GARA (general

architecture for advanced reservation) [4],and specialized III. STANDARDS FOR GRID ENVIRONMENTS
resource management services such as Falkon [5]

Connectivity layer defines core communication and OGSA

authentication protocols for easy and secure network
The Global Grid Forum has published the Open Grid Service
transactions. The GSI (Grid Security Infrastructure) [6] protocol Architecture (OGSA). To address the requirements of grid
underlies every Grid transaction. computing in an open and standard way, requires a framework
for distributed systems that support integration,virtualization, and
The Resource layer defines protocols for the publication, management. Such a framework requires a core set of interfaces,
discovery, negotiation, monitoring, accounting and payment of expected behaviors, resource models, and bindings.[12]
sharing operations on individual resources.
OGSA defines requirements for these core capabilities and thus
The GRAM (Grid Resource Access and Management) [7] provides a general reference architecture for grid computing
protocol is used for allocation of computational resources and for environments. It identifies the components and functions that are
monitoring and control of computation on those resources, and useful if not required for a grid environment.
GridFTP [8] for data access and high-speed data transfer.
The Collective layer captures interactions across collections of OGSI
resources, directory services such as MDS (Monitoring and
Discovery Service) [9] allows for the monitoring and discovery As grid computing has evolved it has become clear that a
of VO resources, Condor-G and Nimrod-G are examples of co- service-oriented architecture could provide many benefits in the
allocating, scheduling and brokering services, and MPICH [10] implementation of a grid infrastructure. The Global Grid Forum
for Grid enabled programming systems, and CAS (community extended the concepts defined in OGSA to define specific
authorization service) [11] for global resource policies. interfaces to various services that would implement the functions
defined by OGSA.
APPLICATION
More specifically, the Open Grid Services Interface (OGSI)
defines mechanisms for creating, managing, and exchanging
information among Grid services. A Grid service is a Web
service that conforms to a set of interfaces and behaviors that
define how a client interacts with a Grid service. These interfaces
COLLECTIVE and behaviors, along with other OGSI mechanisms associated
with Grid service creation and discovery, provide the basis for a
robust grid environment. OGSI provides the Web Service
Definition Language (WSDL) definitions for these key
interfaces.

RESOURCE OGSA-DAI

The OGSA-DAI (data access and integration) project is

concerned with constructing middleware to assist with access and
integration of data from separate data sources via the grid. The
project was conceived by the UK Database Task Force and is
CONNECTIVITY working closely with the Global Grid Forum DAIS-WG and the
Globus team.[12]

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International Journal of Scientific and Research Publications, Volume 3, Issue 8, August 2013 3
ISSN 2250-3153

GridFTP past, distributed computing promised this collaboration and

achieved it to some extent.[12]
GridFTP is a secure and reliable data transfer protocol providing
high performance and optimized for wide-area networks that Access to additional resources
have high bandwidth. As one might guess from its name, it is
based upon the Internet FTP protocol and includes extensions As already stated, in addition to CPU and storage resources, a
that make it a desirable tool in a grid environment. The GridFTP grid can provide access to other resources as well. The additional
protocol specification is a proposed recommendation document resources can be provided in additional numbers and/or
in the Global Grid Forum (GFD-R-P.020).[12] capacity.[12]

GridFTP uses basic Grid security on both control (command) and Resource balancing
data channels. Features include multiple data channels for
parallel transfers, partial file transfers, third-party transfers, and grid federates a large number of resources contributed by
more. individual machines into a large single-system image. For
applications that are grid-enabled, the grid can offer a resource
WSRF balancing effect by scheduling grid jobs on machines with low
utilization.[12]
Web Services Resource Framework (WSRF). Basically, WSRF
defines a set of specifications for defining the relationship Reliability
between Web services (that are normally stateless) and stateful
resources.[12] High-end conventional computing systems use expensive
hardware to increase reliability. They are built using chips with
redundant circuits that vote on results, and contain logic to
Web services related standards achieve graceful recovery from an assortment of hardware
failures.
Because Grid services are so closely related to Web services, the
plethora of standards associated with Web services also apply to Management
Grid services. We do not describe all of these standards in this
document, but rather recommend that the reader become familiar The goal to virtualized the resources on the grid and more
with standards commonly associate with Web services,such as: uniformly handle heterogeneous systems will create new
_ XML opportunities to better manage a larger,
_ WSDL more distributed IT infrastructure. It will be easier to visualize
_ SOAP capacity and utilization, making it easier for IT departments to
_ UDDI control expenditures for computing resources over a larger
organization
IV. BENEFITS OF GRID COMPUTING

Exploiting underutilized Resources: V. CONCLUSION

In this we have described about grid computing and its
One of the basic uses of grid computing is to run an existing architecture. All the protocols considered under grid computing
application on a different machine. The machine on which the and benefits of grid computing. In future we will discuss about
application is normally run might be unusually busy due to a
the security issues of grid computing and try to provide specific
peak in activity. The job in question could be run on an idle
machine elsewhere on the grid. solution for the problem of security.

Parallel CPU capacity REFERENCES

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addition to pure scientific needs, such computing power is An open grid services architecture for distributed systems integration”, Grid
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[6] The Globus Security Team. “Globus Toolkit Version 4 Grid Security
Infrastructure: A Standards Perspective,” Technical Report, Argonne National
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[12] Introduction to Grid Computing by Bart Jacob

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Author details :

Shruti N. Pardeshi was born in Jalgaon in 1988.She received her

B.E. degree in Computer from North Maharashtra University, Jalgaon in
2009 and currently working as a lecturer in computer department
,SSBT’s COET ,Bambhori , Jalgaon.

Chitra J. Patil was born in Jalgaon in 1991.She received her B.E.

degree in Computer from North Maharashtra University, Jalgaon in
2012 and currently working as a lecturer in computer department
,SSBT’s COET ,Bambhori , Jalgaon.

Snehal Dhumale : was born in Bhusawal in 1990..She received her

B.E. degree in Information Technology from pune University, Jalgaon
in 2011 and currently working as a lecturer in computer department
,SSBT’s COET ,Bambhori , Jalgaon.

www.ijsrp.org