Computing Seminar

Grid Computing: Resource Sharing and Coordinated Problem Solving in Scalable Distributed Communities

Ian Foster,
Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago
Carl Kesselman,
University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute

Abstract

Grid computing technologies enable controlled resource sharing in distributed communities and the coordinated use of those shared resources as community members tackle common goals. These technologies include new protocols, services, and APIs for secure resource access, resource management, fault detection, communication, and so forth, that in term enable new application concepts such as virtual data, smart instruments, collaborative design spaces, and metacomputations.

In this talk, we review applications that are motivating widespread interest in Grid concepts within the scientific and engineering communities. Then, we describe the Globus Grid architecture that has been adopted by many Grid projects, focusing in particular on our security, resource management, and data management technologies.

About the speakers: Dr. Ian Foster is Senior Scientist and Associate Director of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago, and Senior Fellow in the Argonne/U.Chicago Computation Institute. He has published four books and numerous articles in parallel and distributed processing, software engineering, and computational science. He currently co-leads the Globus project with Dr. Carl Kesselman of USC/ISI, which was awarded the 1997 Global Information Infrastructure "Next Generation'' award and which provides protocols and services used by many distributed computing projects worldwide. He co-founded the influential Grid Forum and recently co-edited with Kesselman a book on this topic, published by Morgan-Kaufmann, entitled "The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure."