Grid Computing
Grid in Need is a Grid Indeed
A Lite History
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Internet was one of the ambitious networking project of DARPA(US Military). It was used only by few military department in US for information exchange. Later this ambitious project was accepted and used by many to form a network of computers across the Educational and research institutions which later expanded to other domains to form World Wide Web. Presently Internet has become a part of our hi-tech life, some of us cannot imagine to live without it. Its used for information exchange & browsing, mail exchange and publishing, e-commerce and others making it as a information highway of the current world. We accept that Internet has changed the life in many aspects of communications and other utilities of life. Internet has become one of the members in the commodity list in the computing world.
Due to broad acceptance of Internet by the community across the world a new area in research has evolved to do computing on the Internet to use the "Idle" Computers that are connected to the Internet. Idle computers are the computers which are connected to the net, but physically not doing any work or computation and may be in screen saver mode running a screen saver. This opportunity gives the researchers in this area to use the idle computers across the Internet for better use and better cause which is beneficial to human kind and technology. This area of research is called GRID computing. GRID is analogous to "Electrical Grid" in which the world is connected to use it. We daily use electricity irrespective of knowing where it is generated, path from which the power has flown and the source of it. In the same way Grid Technology is evolving as the next generation computing on the Internet. So one day we can all see that using the bare bones of the computer without Hard disk, RAM and processor, just plugging into the wall socket and get the required resources for computing as we do it for electricity The basic idea behind this is to divide a huge work which takes months to complete on a standalone computer,divide the work into many pieces which can be done by a standalone computer at their idle time. Finally gather the work done by these computers to produce the result.This is easy to say, but work done behind the background is a mighty task which involves plan, design, integration, security, abstraction, sharing of resources. Our group Centre for Unified Computing, is one of the core Grid Computing research group in Ireland .Centre for Unified Computing group is one of the research group of Grid-Ireland connecting many virtual organizations forming greater GRID community. It provides many middleware services to the Grid Community. Its aims to hide the GRID or Abstract supercomputer of the user.Major release of our research group is WebCom-G "The middleware to hide the GRID"
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Grid Computing In Ireland
Grid Ireland started in the year 1999 with its operation centre at Trinity College Dublin , with technology development in Centre for Unified Computing in University College Cork and Application development centre in National University of Ireland Galway.Other institutions that co-exist/collaborate with it are Dublin Institute of Advance Studies<DIAS> (School of Cosmic Physics), Met Eireann , Armagh Observatory and finally Queens University Belfast ( Northern Ireland). In total, there are total of 12 institutions constituting to station a Gateway machine at each Institution.The Internet back bone is supported by HEAnet. Science Foundation Ireland, Enterprise Ireland, Higher Education Authority , The European Agency are the funding bodies.The Virtual Organization in Ireland, for Grid-enabled Computational Physics of Natural Phenomena (CosmoGrid ) is led by DIAS (Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies) - the other partners are DCU , NUIG, UCD, HEAnet, Met Eireann, Armagh Observatory, and Grid-Ireland.
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Grid Computing In our Group-Centre for Unified Computing
The core of our research group is Condensed Graph. Condensed Graph is our supervisors PhD thesis. Data Flow Model -- Fix the destination let the operators & operands flow. Control Flow Model -- Fix the operands and destination let the operators flow. Demand driven Model-- Fix the operands and operators, make destination flow. Unified Model of computing --which has the special case Data driven , Imperative driven and Demand driven. This model of computing is Condensed Graph model of computing. Condensed Graph model of computing exhibits laziness, eagerness and speculative behavior.
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Condensed Graph Model:
Node is a meeting place. Node in the graph can represent task or a graph.
eager:
1) lot of partial results
2) lead to shortest part (speedup execution time)
3) doing execution that are not in need
demand:
1) operations needed has to be done
2) some operations has to be done/completed
lazy:
1) delay the execution to later time
2) to over come latency
Complements: Dr. John Morrison