| Tuesday, February 14 |
| 10:30 am - 12:00 pm | |
| |
Defining the "GRID"
(90 mins)
Frederica Darema, NSF/CISE
The “grid concept” which in the mid-90’s was the purview of a few academics is now entrenching the industrial sector. In some ways the grid started formalizing ideas that preceded it, like distributed computing environments (DCEs), but with an emphasis more akin to the parallel, cluster, NOWs, and metacomputing environments. The first demos of “grids” starting with the I-Way at SC’95, were a step beyond the high-end (supercomputer) parallel, or cluster, or NOW systems and put emphasis on creating computational capabilities where a single application model can be partitioned and deploy multiple, heterogeneous and geographically distributed platforms, where each of these “nodes” could in itself be a high-end (supercomputer) system, in other words, the grid was originally viewed as a means of increasing the computational (mips & flops) power, beyond the high-end or supercomputers of that time. The emerging term for such grids was: computational grids.
Together with efforts that built upon the notions of DCE, as computational grids’ environments enabled larger applications to execute, two other aspects became apparent: 1) larger capabilities also entailed larger and often distributed sets of data (consumed or produced by such applications) and 2) application models that incorporate multiple modalities of the application system (complex application models). These two aspects, pointed to another modalities of “grids”, more akin to the notions of DCE’s, where grids enable executing the various models of a complex applications on different (and perhaps specialized) platforms of the grid; and even notions like workflow, which were popular in the late 80’s and early 90’s for CIM (Computer Integrated Manufacturing) applications are again finding their way to the present grids.
All these aspects and grid modalities give the impression of a non-coherent view of what is the “grid”, it looks like the proverbial ‘parts of the elephant”. As emerging and future directions, which dynamically integrate computational and observational (measurement instruments and sensor networks) aspects, such environments will further extend the grid notions, and it behooves us to have a discussion for the defining a concerted notion of the “grid concept”.
Agenda:
This panel, consisting of developers and users of grid technologies advances, and notable visionaries, will discuss their views of what’s the “grid” and how to lay the foundation of a definition for the grid.
Location: Mycenae
|
| |
| |
|
| |
| | Slides: DDDAS - Darema |
| | Document (PDF): Defining the Grid |
| | Slides: Defining The Grid - Darema |
| | Slides: Defining the Grid - Gagliardi |
| | Slides: Production Grids in Enterprise & Research - Darema |
| | Slides: Two Examples of Grid - Fox |
| | Slides: What is the Grid - Foster |