USERS IN THE GRID COMPUTING ENVIRONMENT
Bulakh B.1
1IASA, National Technical University of
Ukraine “Kyiv Polytechnic Institute”, 37
Peremogy Avenue.,
Over the last decade the progress in the area
of parallel and distributed computing has resulted in emerging and rapid
development of Grid Computing. Grid system may deal with different user communities,
such as developers, scientists, administrators, regular users etc. Each of
these groups has its own requirements to Grid functionality and set of
operations to be performed: simply run Grid jobs, develop Grid-aware programs
and middleware, solve problems in specialized
Problem-Solving Environments (PSE) and so on.
While it still can be possible to develop
Grid applications with traditional programming tools it is obvious that much
more effectively this goal can be achieved with specialized solutions for
distributed and parallel programming. The latter can be classified in many
ways: shared state models (JavaSpaces),
message-passing models - two sided (MPI solutions: Grid-enabled MPICH, MagPIe), one-sided message-passing (MPI-2, also in form of RMI, RPC),
peer-to-peer models (JXTA), combined models (with OpenMP
or so) to name some. Several advanced framework and Grid portal solutions have
already emerged.
While the tools developed in the last twenty years
of parallel and distributed computing have become established, and will
continue to play an important role in the development of grid software, the
expanded resource richness of the grid means that middleware will emerge as an equally important class of tools.
Middleware will typically be built on top of the established tools to provide
additional useful abstractions to the grid programmer. Today there are a lot of
middleware packages (Globus Toolkit, EGEE gLite, NorduGrid ARC, UNICORE are
most popular) – most of them are ready-for-use, with rich functionality. They
provide the set of basic already implemented services on authorization,
security, data transfer, resource brokering. But the very important problem (particular
for Ukrainian) is to provide interoperability for those different packages in
order to link different existing Grid infrastructures into national or larger
Grids.