"Grid computing is a promising emerging technology that is
growing in mindshare and relevance in the industry. Applications
that take advantage of grids are under development in both academic
and commercial organizations. You can find many definitions of Grid
computing, but the essence of the grid is the federation of
computing resources to accelerate application processing, plus the
virtualization of these resources. At its core, the grid is all
about distributed computing and resource management.
"A wide array of heterogeneous resources comprise a grid, and
it's important that they interact and behave in well-known and
consistent ways. The need for open standards that define this
interaction and encourage interoperability between components
supplied from different sources was the motivation for the Open
Grid Services Architecture (OGSA), specified by the Open Grid
Services Infrastructure working group of the Global Grid Forum
(GGF) in June 2002. In this article, we lay out the components of
OGSA and explain their significance. The Globus Toolkit 3 is the
first major implementation of the standard; others are under
development..."
