Copyright © 2003 Elsevier Science (USA). All rights reserved.
Necessity is the mother of invention: a simple grid computing system using commodity tools
Received 8 April 2001;
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Abstract
Access to sufficient resources is a barrier to scientific progress for many researchers facing large computational problems. Gaining access to large-scale resources (i.e., university-wide or federally supported computer centers) can be difficult, given their limited availability, particular architectures, and request/review/approval cycles. Simultaneously, researchers often find themselves with access to workstations and older clusters overlooked by their owners in favor of newer hardware. Software to tie these resources into a coherent Grid, however, has been problematic. Here, we describe our experiences building a Grid computing system to conduct a large-scale simulation study using “borrowed” computing resources distributed over a wide area. Using standard software components, we have produced a Grid computing system capable of coupling several hundred processors spanning multiple continents and administrative domains. We believe that this system fills an important niche between a closely coupled local system and a heavyweight, highly customized wide area system.
Author Keywords: Apache; Distributed computing; Grid computing; HTTP; Java; Linux; Perl; SQL; UNIX; XML-RPC
Article Outline
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Scientific context
- 3. Implementation
- 3.1. System constraints
- 3.2. General design of the grid system
- 3.3. System requirements
- 3.4. System processes
- 3.4.1. user level processes
- 3.4.2. grid_client processes
- 3.4.3. project processes: executed once per invocation by grid_client process
- 3.5. Basic features
- 4. Performance considerations
- 5. Future work
- 6. Conclusions
- Acknowledgements
- References
- Vitae







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