Grid Computing Environments

Grid computing environments can be defined as computing environments that are fundamentally distributed, heterogeneous, and dynamic for resources and performance. As inspired by [19], the Grid will establish a huge environment, connected by global computer systems such as end-computers, databases, and instruments, to make a World-Wide-Web-like distributed system for science and engineering. The majority of scientific and engineering researchers believe that the future of computing will depend heavily on the Grid for efficient and powerful computing, improving legacy technology, increasing demand-driven access to computational power, increasing utilization of idle capacity, sharing computational results, and providing new problem-solving techniques and tools. Of course, substantially powerful Grids can be established using high-performance networking, computing, and programming support regardless of the location resources and users. What then will be the biggest potential issues in terms of programming support to simplify distributed heterogeneous computing in the same way that the World-Wide-Web simplified information sharing over the internet? High-performance is one possible answer since a slow system which has a clever motivation is useless. Another answer could be the thirst for grid-enabled applications, hiding the ``heterogeneity'' and ``complexity'' of grid environments without losing performance. Today, grid-enabled application programmers write applications in what, in effect, is assembly language: sometimes using explicit calls to the Internet Protocol's User Datagram Protocol (UDP) or Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), explicit or no management of failure, hard-coded configuration decisions for specific computing systems. We are somewhat far from portable, efficient, high-level languages.