The grid: a survey on global efforts in grid computing

The last decade has seen a considerable increase in commodity computer and network performance, mainly as a result of faster hardware and more sophisticated software. Nevertheless, there are still problems, in the fields of science, engineering and business, which cannot be dealt effectively with the current generation of supercomputers. In fact, due to their size and complexity, these problems are often numerically and/or data intensive and require a variety of heterogeneous resources that are not available from a single machine. A number of teams have conducted experimental studies on the cooperative use of geographically distributed resources conceived as a single powerful computer. This new approach is known by several names, such as, metacomputing, seamless scalable computing, global computing, and more recently grid computing. The early efforts in grid computing started as a project to link supercomputing sites, but now it has grown far beyond its original intent. In fact, there are many applications that can benefit from the grid infrastructure, including collaborative engineering, data exploration, high throughput computing, and of course distributed supercomputing. Moreover, the rapid and impressive growth of the Internet, there has been a rising interest in web-based parallel computing. In fact, many projected have been incepted to exploit the Web as an infrastructure for running coarse-grained distributed parallel applications. In this context, the web has the capability to become a suitable and potentially infinite scalable metacomputer for parallel and collaborative work as well as a key technology to create a pervasive and ubiquitous grid infrastructure. This paper aims to present the state-of-the-art of grid computing and attempts to survey the major international adventures in developing this upcoming technology.