developerWorks: How Grid Infrastructure Affects Application Design

“First, we’ll look at the typical grid infrastructure components
and how each component can affect the application architecture,
design, and deployment. These are the main components of a grid
infrastructure:

• “Security. Security is an important
  consideration in Grid computing. Each grid resource may have
  different security policies that need to be complied with. A single
  sign-on authentication method is a necessity. A commonly
  agreed-upon method of negotiating authorization is also
  needed.
• “Resource management. When a job is submitted,
  the grid resource manager is concerned with assigning a resource to
  the job, monitoring its status, and returning its results.
• “Information services. For the grid resource
  manager to make informed decisions on resource assignments, the
  grid resource manager needs to know what grid resources are
  available, as well as their capacities and current utilization.
  This knowledge about the grid resources is maintained and provided
  by Grid Information Service (GIS), also known as the Monitoring and
  Discovery Service (MDS)…
• “Data management. Data management is concerned
  with how jobs transfer data or access shared storage.

“Let’s look at each of these components in more detail…”

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